Godaddy Website Hosting
Godaddy Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site 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, usually 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
Up till 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was complicated 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 capability to do this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the web 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 pressure for organizations, both large 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 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and sometimes 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 often has a greater cost 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 company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site needs a more comprehensive 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 customers to create 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 website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, 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 type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a fair amount 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 tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer usually does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 user gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the customer expects they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick method 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 supplied 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 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly available 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime statistics. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer is encouraged to 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based website 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 web hosting user might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is an important item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential customer and can be a major component when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including 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.