Ecommerce Website Hosting Australia
Ecommerce Website Hosting Australia
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer 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 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
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 small 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to achieve this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop 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 increased, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website requires a more expanded package that offers 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 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found 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 available with this type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 a fair amount 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 provide 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a few reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may 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 offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user generally does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally 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 website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not permitted full 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 customer typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website 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 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 allow 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 modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate 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 invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website 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 number of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 kinds 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 could 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 web server that does not 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly accessible 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime info. 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
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website 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 user might 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 user 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 be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.