Website Hosting Terms And Conditions
Website Hosting Terms And Conditions
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply 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 offer 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 web 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 additional internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to complete this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and at times 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 sometimes has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to 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 online orders.
A complicated site calls for 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 create or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often 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 customer has full administrative 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 website server but is not allowed complete control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client generally doesn't 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 company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits users 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 computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client assumes they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits 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, a single server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful way to attain 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 offered by web 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 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly accessible 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) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime statistics. Quite a few 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 website hosting user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet security is a very important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a potential customer and can be a major point when considering which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, including 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.