Website Hosting And Maintenance UK
Website Hosting And Maintenance UK
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people 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 users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to complete this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create 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 demand for organizations, both big and small, 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 basic 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 very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site calls for a more expanded package that offers 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 develop 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 quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found 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 available with this type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for a number of reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control 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 granting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client guesses they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine located in a private residence 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 home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common way to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds 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 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 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime info. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also prefer 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 often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, internet security is a very important topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is quite important to a prospective client and can be a major subject when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.