Website Hosting Reseller Plans
Website Hosting Reseller Plans
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website hosts can also supply 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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to manage this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 grew, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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) offer this service free to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often 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 investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site demands 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 programs allow customers 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 safe.
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 site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared website hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 differentiate a lot 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 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 split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user typically doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website 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 are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their user's computer, providing just 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 hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively 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 may be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host 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 website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites 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 not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 supplied 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 web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web 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 site 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 as in the event of a 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 systems. This 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 sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime information. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer is encouraged 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 lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 web hosting customer 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 user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer 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 be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, online security is an important concern. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major subject when considering which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.