Genealogy Website Hosting
Genealogy Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their site 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. 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
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 tiny number of web 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 greater internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to do this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known 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 website 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, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 web site interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and often 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 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 constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site needs a more inclusive 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 customers to write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
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 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a great deal 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 offer the technical 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 allocated 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, but, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often 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 customer gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally doesn't 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 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 customer gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit 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 hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website 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
Typically, an individual server located 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 old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful method to attain 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered 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 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 website 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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 offer Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a prospective client and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.