Static Website Hosting Redirection Rules
Static Website Hosting Redirection Rules
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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 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 more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to complete this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and often 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 sometimes has a higher cost 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 so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site needs a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow clients to write 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become 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 vary quite a bit 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
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a number of reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 user gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support 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 their 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 insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind 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 reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client thinks they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website 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 form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by website 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 might 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 website server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 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 as in the event of 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 servers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime stats. A lot 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer must 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. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may 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 at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential customer and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted 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, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.