Dynamic Website Hosting AWS
Dynamic Website Hosting AWS
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website hosts can also offer 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
Up till 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 until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional 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 or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 website interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to subscribers. People and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often 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 higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently 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 website orders.
A complicated website requires a more inclusive package that provides 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 create 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 website hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 quite a bit 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 supply 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 often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client generally does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (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 customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions 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 just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to get 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting provided 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 website 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 at times 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 website is publicly accessible 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 as in the event of a 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 computers. 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Most 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
Web hosting is often provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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 supply Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, web security is an extreme issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a client will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.