How To Start Website Hosting Business
How To Start Website Hosting Business
A website 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 organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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 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 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to do this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site 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 internet increased, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times 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 often has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to 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 complex site requires a more comprehensive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 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 provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for different reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user 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 customer sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user 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 disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's computer, providing only 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, 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 goes down. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting provided 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 could 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 website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime information. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs 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 provide Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose 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. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is a vital topic. 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 site. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major issue when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.