Vistaprint Website Hosting
Vistaprint Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, 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 created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to achieve this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a website 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 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 most basic is aweb 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 very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 often has a greater 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 constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site needs a more expanded 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 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 web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become 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 vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be wanted for a few reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client sometimes doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 their own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, many colocation providers would allow any computer 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 allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update 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 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 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly accessible and reachable via the internet. This is different 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 servers. This scheduled downtime is at times not included in 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 time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime stats. A number of 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally 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 should 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 provide Linux-based website 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 web hosting customer may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user 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 does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, which include 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.