Graphic Design Portfolio Website Hosting
Graphic Design Portfolio Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web 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. 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
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 created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to achieve this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as 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 web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 web interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations 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 big 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site 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 programs allow clients 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web 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 sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of 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 great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client 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 customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage 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 allowing the client to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers 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 websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known way to keep 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 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 supply 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 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 site is publicly accessible 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) may include a certain 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is crucial. Not all providers show uptime information. Many 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many 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 supply Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 website hosting user may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is a very important concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective client and can be a major topic when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.