Find A Website Hosting Source
Find A Website Hosting Source
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website accessible 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, typically in a data center. Web 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
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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was complicated 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 expertise to complete this, website hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required 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 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 grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations 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 interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to subscribers. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers 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 website orders.
A complicated 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 options 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for a few reasons, including 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 generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 customer gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete 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 software. The customer is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to 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 computer. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing just 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, many colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, 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 computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user expects they may 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 a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy method to get 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 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 offer 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 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers provide uptime stats. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 web hosting client may want to obtain 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, online security is an important item. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a potential client and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.