Design Website Hosting
Design Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the internet for other servers located in their data center, called colocation, also known as Housing in Latin America or France.
History
Until 1991, the internet was limited to use only "...for research and education in the sciences and engineering..." and was used for email, telnet, FTP and USENET traffic, but only a tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to complete this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. People and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website calls for a more comprehensive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow clients to develop or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for websites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for different reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client sometimes doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer guesses they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a single server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by website host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not website pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host can also supply an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often referred to as a "headless" server. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce, blogs, etc.).
Reliability and Uptime
The availability of a site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly available and reachable via the internet. This is different from measuring the uptime of a system. Uptime refers to the system itself being online. Uptime does not take into account being able to reach it when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is sometimes excluded from the SLA timeframe and needs to be subtracted from the Total Time when availability is calculated. Depending on the wording of an SLA, if the availability of a computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime statistics. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what type of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital concern. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a possible client and can be a major item when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.