What Is Unlimited Website Hosting
What Is Unlimited Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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
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 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 web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, 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 money or expertise to complete this, web site hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, 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 internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative 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 web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently 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 supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site requires a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow customers to develop 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of website 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 a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply 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 split up 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 desired for a number of reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might 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 tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally does not 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client 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 user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their client's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 types of hosting provided 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 can 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 doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally 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 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. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers provide uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged 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 number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often 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 sites which belong to their customers, web security is an important issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major component when deciding which provider a client will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.