WordPress Com Website Hosting
WordPress Com Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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 provide 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to complete this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, 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 website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand 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 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. People and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, at times 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 at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to 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 website calls for 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 clients 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Usually, 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 sell shared web hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 differentiate tremendously 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 offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a number of reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often 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 gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often doesn't own the server. One type 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 customer 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 is not allowed full control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their customer's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 accept any system 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 relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer thinks they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great way to get 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 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 website 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers show uptime info. Quite a few 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer needs to 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 usual 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 might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a possible client and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.