Scalable Website Hosting
Scalable Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide 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 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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to complete this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop 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 increased, the demand for organizations, both large 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 website interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often 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 generally has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations 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 supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site calls for a more expanded package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers to develop or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for websites 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 differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared website hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate tremendously 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 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 split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally 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 customer has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his 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 hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers 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 improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single machine located in a private residence 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 old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known method to have a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 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 can also supply an interface or control panel for managing the web 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 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 during 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 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime stats. 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also choose 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. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is a very important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is quite important to a potential client and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.