Website Hosting Registrar
Website Hosting Registrar
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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 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
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 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 some opening up of internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to achieve this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. 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 web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand 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 almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and at times 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 higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website needs a more comprehensive package that offers 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 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. 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 generally provide shared web hosting and web companies at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 differentiate a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical 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 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 at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally doesn't own the server. One type 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 customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is disallowed 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 client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide 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 their own administrator go to 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 hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A good method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 kinds of hosting provided 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 may 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime info. 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
Web hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer 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 often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major issue when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.