Website Hosting Hk
Website Hosting Hk
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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
Until 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to complete this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the web 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 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 simplest 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site will have 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 facilities allow clients to develop 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies 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 that are available with this kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared web hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 quite a bit 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might 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 provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the customer 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 complete control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage 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 giving the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user often 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 client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support 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 go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client assumes they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy method to attain 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered 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 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 web 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 website is publicly available 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime info. A number of 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client is encouraged 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. a lot of hosting providers supply Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 customer may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a website 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, web security is an extreme issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a prospective customer and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.