Website Hosting & Design
Website Hosting & Design
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. 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 limited 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 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 additional internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to achieve this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, 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 large companies that are not ISPs 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 online orders.
A complex website requires 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 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 web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these 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 nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user sometimes doesn't 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 their own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits 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 computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the user expects they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website 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 performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great method to get a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 offered 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 may also provide 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 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 website 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) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. 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. a lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, web security is an important issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major item when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.