Ipage Website Hosting
Ipage Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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 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 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 more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to achieve this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found 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 that are available with this kind of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for different reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user sometimes does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client typically 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 organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any system 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 breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client expects they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy way to have 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 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 provide an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 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 per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 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 changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, web security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is quite important to a potential client and can be a major item when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. 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.