Odoo Website Hosting
Odoo Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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
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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was convoluted 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 money or expertise to manage this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a site 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 world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website requires 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 customers 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become website 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 provide 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 does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the client (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 client often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client 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 type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any system 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 kind of hosting platform that permits customers 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 computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client expects they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control on where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros 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, an individual computer located 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 servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to have 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 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 could 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 web server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally 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 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) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a complete 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 web hosting customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer 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. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, online security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is very important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when considering which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers 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 different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.