Social Website Hosting
Social Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals 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 customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web hosts can also supply 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site 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 web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to manage this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build 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 internet grew, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. 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 interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site calls for a more inclusive 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 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 differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 at times make available shared web hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 differentiate a lot 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 supply 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a number of reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often does not own the server. One type 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server but is not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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, a lot 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 modern type of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer guesses they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to get 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 kinds of hosting supplied by website 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 could also offer 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 doesn't 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 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 when there is a 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 servers. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime stats. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web 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. Most hosting providers offer 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 web hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose 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. Website hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major consideration when considering which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.