Full Service Website Hosting
Full Service Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established 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 access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to manage this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. People and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, generally supported by adds, 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 sometimes has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site will have a more expanded package that supplies 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web 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 available with this kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 quite a bit 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 provide 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 split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for varying reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer typically doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
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 costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type 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 stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing 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 a lot of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known method to attain 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 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 could 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 web server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 website is publicly available 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 as in the event of a 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 systems. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web 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 offer Linux-based website 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 customer may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer 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 often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a client should choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.