Website Hosting San Diego
Website Hosting San Diego
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, 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
Up till 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 created and not till 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 website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to complete this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 site interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often 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 at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site will have a more inclusive 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
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 websites. Typically, 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate 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 technical 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 does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a number of reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer usually doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply 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 customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site 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 failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user thinks they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great way to attain 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 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 might 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 does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 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) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website 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. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based web 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 customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client 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 website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a prospective customer and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.