Website Hosting 101
Website Hosting 101
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
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 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 web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to complete this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 internet grew, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to users. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, 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 at times 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 company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site will have a more comprehensive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow customers to create 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 differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following 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 offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be desired for a few reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide 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 user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many 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 permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or more websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful way to have 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 types of hosting provided 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 could 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 doesn't 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers produce uptime statistics. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot 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. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is a very important topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential client and can be a major component when considering which provider a client will choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.