Free Swtor Guild Website Hosting
Free Swtor Guild Website Hosting
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. Website hosts are companies that supply 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 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
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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to manage this, web site hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct 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 internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. 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 website interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website calls for a more inclusive 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 websites 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 differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for different reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally 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 client gets his or her own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often 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 user gets their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, 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 servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting system. 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 pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 provided by web 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 can also offer an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website 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 such as 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 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime information. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 website hosting user may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might 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 sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet 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 site to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major point when deciding which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.