Evansville Website Hosting
Evansville Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies 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 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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to manage this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct 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 grew, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies 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 web interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, 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 generally has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web so they can 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 complex site calls for 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 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 varies quite a bit.
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 that are available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply 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 allocated 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 might be chosen for a few reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container between servers. Users might 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 supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user sometimes does not own the server. One kind 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the customer 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 tools. The customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that allows clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user assumes they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A good method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change 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 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 website server that does not 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 website 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. 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 sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is a vital concern. 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 website. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major component when deciding which provider a client will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.