Website Hosting Siteground
Website Hosting Siteground
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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
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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to do this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a website 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 world wide web grew, 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 most simple 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web in order to 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 website orders.
A complex website demands 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 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 vary a lot 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be wanted for different reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes 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 customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer usually 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 customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern 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 might be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer assumes they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to get 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 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 might also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that doesn't 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 website 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. a lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major issue when considering which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include 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.