Website Hosting Reseller Business
Website Hosting Reseller Business
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations 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 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to complete this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to build a site 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 increased, the pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to subscribers. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes 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 at times has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs 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 provide details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site 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 facilities allow clients to write 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites 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 type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients 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 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 supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for varying reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes 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 user gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to 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 hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 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 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 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 website is publicly available 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 specific 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally 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 release uptime info. Many 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
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs to 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 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 web hosting user may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer 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. Web hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an important topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a potential client and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.