South Florida Website Hosting
South Florida Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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
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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was confused 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 budget or experience to do this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a website 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 companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite 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 almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater 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 in order to 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 complicated site requires 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 customers to create 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 web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites 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 kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits 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 working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 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, but, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer typically 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 administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed complete control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, many colocation providers would accept any server 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 clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, 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 charge users only for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for users 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 building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful way to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 may 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 often 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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. a lot of hosting providers offer 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 website hosting user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, web security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a prospective client and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.