Emerald Website Hosting
Emerald Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to do this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design 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 increased, the demand for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater 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 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site calls for a more comprehensive 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 write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared web hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following 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 provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be wanted for different reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might 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 administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically 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 user 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 web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client typically 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 server. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power outages 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 used by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user assumes they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual server located in a private home can be used to host one or more websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting provided 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 may also provide 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime information. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times supplied 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 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. Most 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 have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may 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 website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is a very important topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major component when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.