Telus Website Hosting
Telus Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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
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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to complete this, website hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, 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 simplest 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 almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web 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 website orders.
A complicated website will have 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 programs allow customers to write 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 website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 differentiate tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for a few reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing 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 website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 client gets their own website server but they are 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 customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user usually 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 provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to attain 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 can also provide 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 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 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 as in the event of 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 servers. The 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 time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes offered as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 user may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is an important topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a possible customer and can be a major topic when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.