Lamp Website Hosting
Lamp Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide 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 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 created and not till 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 access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to manage this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. People and companies may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and sometimes 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 at times has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website needs a more comprehensive 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these 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 offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a few reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. 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 provide server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client sometimes does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 user gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of 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 assistance directly for their client's machine, providing only 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, many colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 site might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer guesses they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to get 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds 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 may 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 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. Many 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 generally provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might 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 often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, web security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a prospective customer and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include 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.