S3 Website Hosting
S3 Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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 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 put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a website 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 internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, 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 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website 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 big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website 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 facilities 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 a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 quite a bit 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 offer 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 doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a few reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client generally 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 admin 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 is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user sometimes 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 user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their user's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator go to 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 hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user assumes they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 might 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Quite a few 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer is encouraged to 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer 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 concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important issue. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different 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.