Domain Registration And Website Hosting
Domain Registration And Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to achieve this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet 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 providing 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 very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website demands 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 create or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
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 types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for different reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual server placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A great way 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 types of hosting offered by website 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 might also offer an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web 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 differs 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) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client should 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 number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also choose 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 does not have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is an extreme issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective client and can be a major subject when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.