How Website Hosting Works
How Website Hosting Works
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to complete this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations 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 interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, 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 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 organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website will have 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 differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site 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 kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and web companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 handed out in a way that does not 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 different reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user 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 user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they might consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation 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 web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy method to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 supplied by website 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 might also provide 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 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 website 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 when there is a 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 computers. The scheduled downtime is at times not included in 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 sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Most 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer is encouraged 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 offer Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is a very important concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major topic when deciding which supplier a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.