Google India Website Hosting
Google India Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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
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 established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to do this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop 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 pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is aweb 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 very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often 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 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 internet-based orders.
A complex website calls for a more expanded package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow customers 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for varying reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 user gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer 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 kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client assumes they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work 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 good method to attain 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 points 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 provide 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 often 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) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Quite a few 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 at times supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 have other services, such as email for their organization 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is an extreme topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is very important to a potential client and can be a major subject when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include 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.