Pantheon Website Hosting
Pantheon Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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
Until 1991, the internet was restricted 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 browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to complete this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website 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 offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to subscribers. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 generally has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website calls for 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 develop 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 web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this kind of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech 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 does not 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 desired for a number of reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and gets complete 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 generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
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 server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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 allow any system 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 modern type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, 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 invoice users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client guesses they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual server located in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy method to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 can also offer 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly available 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 as in the event of a 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 systems. 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Quite a few 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer must 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 website hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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, web security is an important concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.