Sports Club Website Hosting
Sports Club 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. Web hosts are organizations that provide 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 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
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 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 greater internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to complete this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 web site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain 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 at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website needs a more inclusive package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared website hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be website 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 a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical 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 does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically 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 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 user gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (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 not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting 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 Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their user's computer, 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 number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate 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 decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client guesses they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known 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 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 could also supply 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 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 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is at times excluded from 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime stats. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer is encouraged 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 number of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 website hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital item. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a possible client and can be a major component when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.