One Page Website Hosting
One Page Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible 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, usually 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website 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 organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations 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 get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct 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 world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, 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 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally 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 generally has a greater investment 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site requires 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 options allow clients to create 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 website hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to become website 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 vary a great deal 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 supply the technical 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a number of reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user usually doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally 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 their own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit 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 organizations now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern 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 servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat fee for the amount the user assumes they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 types of hosting supplied 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 may also offer 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 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 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 such as during 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 systems. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime stats. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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 website hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose 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. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is an important concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a possible client and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious users 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.