Website Hosting Guide
Website Hosting Guide
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 small 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 web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to do this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a site 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 world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times 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 company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website needs a more comprehensive 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 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 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 located 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows 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 affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client 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 client 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 customer gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their customer's server, providing just 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, a number of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, 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 charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer guesses they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide users less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known way to attain 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by website 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 might also provide 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. A lot 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a complete 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. A number of 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 web hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a vital issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.