S3 Static Website Hosting Domain
S3 Static Website Hosting Domain
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available 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. Website 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was challenging 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 capability 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 website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally 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 cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site needs a more inclusive package that offers 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage 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. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these 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 provide a nearly identical 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and has absolute 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 client has full admin 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 website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user assumes they may consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually 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 stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied 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 might also provide 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 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 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 servers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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 supply 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 customer might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, web security is an important concern. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major item when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, which include 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.