Website Hosting Las Vegas
Website Hosting Las Vegas
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website 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. Website 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 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site 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 site hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand 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 aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website needs 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 tremendously 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 supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates 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 generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers 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 their own website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer usually 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 user has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (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 tools. The client is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 site might be more reliable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client guesses they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing 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 clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 provided 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 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime info. Quite a number 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered 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 is encouraged to 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 typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting customer may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major topic when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.