Difference Between Website Hosting And Domain Name
Difference Between Website Hosting And Domain Name
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible 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 supply 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 restricted 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 written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to do this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web 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 website orders.
A complicated website needs a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow clients to write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 user gets his or her own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit 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 demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the user expects they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server placed in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A good opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by web host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host can also provide an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 website 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 during 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. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime stats. 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. a lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is a very important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.