Microsoft Small Business Website Hosting
Microsoft Small Business Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations 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 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
Until 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established 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 availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website 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, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create 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 world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally 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 constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site requires a more inclusive 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 write 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 varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 vary tremendously 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 offer 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 doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a number of reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer usually doesn't 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 administrative 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 their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or potentially 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 web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, 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 bill users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user assumes they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a single computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or more websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 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 may 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 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 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) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes offered 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 must 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 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 customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is an extreme topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a prospective client and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.