Moving Website Hosting
Moving Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together 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 challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to achieve this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations 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 very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times 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 often has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website needs a more expanded package that provides 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web 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 vary a lot 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 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 underlying hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. The 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 provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full admin access to the server, which means the customer 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 full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website 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 most powerful and expensive type of web 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 customer would have their own administrator visit 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 insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, 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 allows providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual server located 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 computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 can also supply 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 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime information. Quite 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different 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 obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is a very important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a client will choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.