Website Hosting Information
Website Hosting Information
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site 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
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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to complete this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as 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 web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations 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 online orders.
A complicated site calls for a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow customers to create 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 often make available shared website hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for a few reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically 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 computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any server 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 relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user expects they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved 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. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy method to keep 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 supplied by website 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 can also supply 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 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 as in the event of 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 servers. This 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers produce uptime info. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times 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. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 user may want to have other services, such as email for their business 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an important item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.