What Is Website Hosting And Domain
What Is Website Hosting And Domain
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until 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 convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both big 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 simplest 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and generally 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 generally has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large 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 organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website demands a more expanded package that offers 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 websites 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 greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary quite a bit 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 offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 server's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a number of reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, 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 user 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 they are not allowed full control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user typically does not 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 company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to 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 organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively 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 site may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options 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
Sometimes, an individual computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A great opportunity to keep 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting provided by website 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 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 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) 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Most 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 client might want to have 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, web security is a vital concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when considering which provider a client may 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, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.