Law Firm Website Hosting
Law Firm Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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
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 established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to do this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies 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 web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and at times 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 sometimes has a higher 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 to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website requires a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow clients to create 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 greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often 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 client 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 customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage 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 user to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
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 server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client expects they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many 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
Typically, an individual computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful 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 provided 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 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 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 website 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime info. Quite a number of 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 often supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web 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. a lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 web hosting client might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a client will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked 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, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.