Microsoft Website Hosting Services
Microsoft Website Hosting Services
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to manage this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations 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 site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little 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 alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often 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 at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website demands a more inclusive 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 customers 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, 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 quite 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 offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 vary quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for varying reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and has absolute 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 sometimes 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 their own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user 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 user is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server 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 help directly for their customer's computer, providing just 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 allow any system 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 new kind of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over 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 decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user thinks they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of users).
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, an individual computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick method 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered 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 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 sometimes 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers show uptime information. A lot of 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged to 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because 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 relinquishing control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major subject when considering which provider a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, including 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.