Static Website Hosting Https
Static Website Hosting Https
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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
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 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was convoluted 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 money or capability to do this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both big 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 simplest 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and generally 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 at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website 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 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 varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows 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 lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for different reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often 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 client 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 customer gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user 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 software. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer 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 user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 accept any computer 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 new type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server located in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick method to have 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied 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 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 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime information. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times provided as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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 website hosting which provides 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 may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a possible customer and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.