Website Hosting Services For Small Business
Website Hosting Services For Small Business
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 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 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 web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to achieve this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, 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 awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and often 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 often has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website will have 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be wanted for varying reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually 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 their own website server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 customer gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 allow 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 new kind of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great way to get a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 could 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 website server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime information. 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
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what type 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 various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer 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 be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, web security is an extreme topic. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when deciding which provider a client should choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in various 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.