Website Hosting Services Definition
Website Hosting Services Definition
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 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 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 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to do this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build 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 world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally 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 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 goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website demands a more comprehensive package that provides 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
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. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for varying reasons, which includes 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 usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically doesn't own the server. One type 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 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 user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, 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 number of colocation providers would allow any server 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 modern kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the customer guesses they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied by website host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not web 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 website server that doesn't 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers produce uptime stats. Quite a few 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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 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 user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.