Is Website Hosting Taxable
Is Website Hosting Taxable
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
Up till 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 created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to achieve this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called 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 companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 web interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and generally 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 generally has a greater expense 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 to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website will have 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 facilities allow clients to create 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be 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 great deal 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for varying reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (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 user generally doesn't 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 admin 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 web 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 tools. The user is not permitted 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 often does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client thinks they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A good opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 can also offer an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web 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 type of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, online security is a vital worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major item when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.