Website Hosting Monthly Cost
Website Hosting Monthly Cost
A web 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 customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web hosts can also provide 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to manage this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater expense 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 company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website needs a more comprehensive 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 write 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 differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 vary a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user usually doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 client gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern 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 may be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer expects they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 provided 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 provide an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 site 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers produce uptime statistics. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often offered 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 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based website 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 web hosting client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client 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 worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted 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.