Google Cloud Platform Website Hosting
Google Cloud Platform Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations 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 customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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 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 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 organizations had the money or experience to manage this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often 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 cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website will have a more expanded package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities 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 found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 provide shared website hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates 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 generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for different reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (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 permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his 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 organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they might consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem 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 great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy way to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 types of hosting provided 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 can also offer 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 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 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 such as during 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 servers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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 provide 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 user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer 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 sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is a vital item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a possible client and can be a major subject when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.