Dream Website Hosting
Dream Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to achieve this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often 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 big organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website needs a more comprehensive package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 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 may be desired for different reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often 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 user gets his or her own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server but is 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 control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client guesses they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common method to keep 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 may 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 generally 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is often not included in 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 sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime info. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per 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 internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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. a lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 web hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, web security is a vital issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. 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.