Website Hosting Malaysia
Website Hosting Malaysia
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 tiny number of web 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 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, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to complete this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a website 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 grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. Individuals and companies may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web to 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 internet-based orders.
A complex website requires 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 programs allow clients to create 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Typically, 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 sell shared web hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated 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 provide a nearly identical 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be wanted for a few reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users 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 web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often 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 admin 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 web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 accept 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 relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual machine 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 older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to keep 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 directs 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 website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website 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 as in the event of a 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 computers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Quite 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must 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 provide Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 website hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer 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 be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online security is an important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is quite important to a prospective client and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.