Local Website Hosting Company
Local Website Hosting Company
A website 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 organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written 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 access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to manage this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 investment 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website calls for a more expanded package that offers 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared website hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin 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 often 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 user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that allows 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 take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic 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 perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great way to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 offered 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 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 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 website 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime information. A number of 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number 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 number of hosting providers provide 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 website hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.