Microsoft Website Hosting
Microsoft Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 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 until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to complete this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large 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 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes 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 cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website calls for 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 options allow clients 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 often make available shared website hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 tremendously 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 tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that doesn't 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 varying reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 user gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help 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 their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, 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 computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer guesses they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 kinds of hosting supplied by web 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 might 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 website 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 accessible 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) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime info. A number 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web 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 offer Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer might want to have 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an important issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major component when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. 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.