Golf Tournament Website Hosting
Golf Tournament Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies 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
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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to do this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as 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 website 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 grew. 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 web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to users. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher 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 in order 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 website orders.
A complicated website requires a more comprehensive package that provides 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 develop 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 website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites 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 type of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply 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 split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer typically doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single 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 allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 provided by website 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 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 web 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime info. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs to 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 typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is an important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is quite important to a possible client and can be a major topic when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.