Internet Website Hosting Services
Internet Website Hosting Services
A website 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 organizations that provide 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 supply 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 tiny 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 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 or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to achieve this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to design 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 increased, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often 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 generally has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs 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 online orders.
A complicated site requires a more comprehensive 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 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical 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 split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for varying reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's server, providing only 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, many colocation providers would accept 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 modern type 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 reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating 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 lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole computer located in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common method to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by website 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 could 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 web server that does not 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 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) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often 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 sometimes will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs 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 lot of hosting providers supply 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 web hosting user may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose 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 generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major component when deciding which provider a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.