Website Hosting Costs Us
Website Hosting Costs Us
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
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 put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the web 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 small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 companies 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site requires 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 programs 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a great deal 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated 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, however, virtualization might be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user generally does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her 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 control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest 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 just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their 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 hosting companies now require 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 reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole machine located in a private residence 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 older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 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 generally 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. A number 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 at times provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may 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 often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online security is a very important item. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a prospective client and can be a major point when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.