Tumblr Website Hosting
Tumblr Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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
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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to achieve this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a website 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 increased, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and often 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 generally has a greater expense 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 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 online orders.
A complicated website needs a more expanded 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 differentiate 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 provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will generally 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. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user typically doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type 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 customer would have their own administrator visit 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 hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer assumes they might consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number 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 made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common way 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 types of hosting supplied by web 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 web 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 site 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) may include a reasonable 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 often will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often provided as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based website 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 website hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user 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 bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is an extreme concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a prospective client and can be a major consideration when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.