Real Estate Website Hosting With Idx
Real Estate Website Hosting With Idx
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web 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. 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 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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was complicated 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 organizations had the budget or experience to achieve this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the website 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 big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations 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 interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website demands 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 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 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 located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of 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 vary a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. 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 offer server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative 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 his or her own website server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their client's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer 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 new kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they might consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients 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 creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common method to attain 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 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 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 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 site 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 per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is sometimes excluded from 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 provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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. Most hosting providers supply Linux-based web 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 website hosting customer might want to acquire 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 generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, internet security is a vital concern. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major component when considering which provider a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted 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.