Find Website Hosting Details
Find Website Hosting Details
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies 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 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
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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till 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 confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to manage this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure 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 basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes 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 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 supply details of their products and services and facilities for website 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 facilities allow customers to create 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 differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 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, however, virtualization might be wanted for a few reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the customer (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); however, the client often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer generally 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 company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual 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 bill users only for resources used by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give 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 number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single server located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great way to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by web 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 may also supply 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 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 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime info. A lot 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client should 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 supply Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various 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 acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer 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 website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a vital worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major item when considering which provider a client should choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.