Enom Website Hosting
Enom Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to complete this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to design a website 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 world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, 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 very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site will have 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 programs allow customers to develop 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs 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 sites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be 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 vary quite a bit 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 supply the technical 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 generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be desired for a number of reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often doesn't 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 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 client gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the user 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 permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer thinks they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control on where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website 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 clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A good method to keep 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 kinds of hosting supplied 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 might 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 does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 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 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. This scheduled downtime is often 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 offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime information. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 website hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is an important item. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential client and can be a major subject when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. 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.