Gaming Website Hosting
Gaming Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer 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 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 until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to achieve this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also called 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 internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations 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 website interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web 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 big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site requires a more comprehensive package that offers 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared website hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates 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 generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a few reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. 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 client gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer usually 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 client has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their customer's computer, 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, 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 require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 types 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 may also supply 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 during 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 servers. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime info. A lot 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
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 website hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is an important worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a possible client and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked 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.