Inmotion Website Hosting
Inmotion Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to manage this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a site 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 pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb 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 very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website 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 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 greater investment 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site will have a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers to develop 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of 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 vary 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 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 underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for varying reasons, which includes 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 offer server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes does not own the server. One type 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server but is not allowed complete control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer typically 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 user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support 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 their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer 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 relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client thinks they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single server located in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A great opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 types of hosting supplied 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 may 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 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 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. A lot of 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of 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. A number of hosting providers supply Linux-based web 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 customer may 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 client 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 be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, online security is a vital concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a possible customer and can be a major item when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.