Website Hosting Proposal
Website Hosting Proposal
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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
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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to manage this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the web 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 companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations 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 sometimes 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 generally has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site needs a more comprehensive package that supplies 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 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 website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated 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 provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users might 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 supply server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user guesses they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be problematic for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common method to keep 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered by website 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 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 website server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often 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 when there is 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 servers. 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers produce uptime info. 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number 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 website hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is a vital item. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.