Website Hosting Unlimited Storage
Website Hosting Unlimited Storage
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web 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 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 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 put together and not until 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 organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to do this, web hosting services started to supply services 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 websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, 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 basic 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 minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and sometimes 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 sometimes has a higher 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 constantly 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 online orders.
A complicated website demands a more comprehensive package that supplies 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 sites 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 greatly.
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 websites. Typically, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for a number of reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user sometimes doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin 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 their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not given 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 issues. The client generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their client's machine, providing just 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, a lot of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user expects they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give users less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few 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 composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole machine located in a private home can be used to host one or more sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting provided 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 may 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 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 when there is a 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 servers. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime stats. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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 lot 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 website hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose 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 sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, web security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major topic when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.