Website Hosting Pay Monthly
Website Hosting Pay Monthly
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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 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 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 site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to manage this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop 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 increased, the demand for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web 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 sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater investment 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated 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 options 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical 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 underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for different reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can 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 granting the user to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client 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 customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user assumes they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful method to have a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds 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 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 generally 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers produce uptime stats. Most 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
Web hosting is often supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many 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 offer 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 client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer 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 does not have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online 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 website to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a potential customer and can be a major topic when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.