Photography Website Hosting
Photography Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer 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 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 established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site 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 company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to do this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design 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 internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 website interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web 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 companies that are not internet service providers 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 complex 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 facilities 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 web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 tremendously 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared 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, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might 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 admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. One kind 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 client 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 full control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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, many colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 website might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power outages 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 client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user expects they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully 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 quick opportunity to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting provided by web host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not website 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 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 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 website 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Quite a number of 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
Web hosting is at times provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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 web hosting which offers 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 web hosting user may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose 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. Website hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, web security is an important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.