Move Website Hosting
Move Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website 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, usually 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
Until 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 established 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 web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet 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 basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to subscribers. People and companies may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website will have a more inclusive 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 write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 fair amount 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 supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a number of reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. 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 offer server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 client gets his or her own website server but is 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 tools. The client is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their user's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 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 new kind of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common opportunity to have 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied by website 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 might also provide an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime information. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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 lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.