Yahoo Business Website Hosting
Yahoo Business Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
Until 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 created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to manage 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 run the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site requires 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 facilities allow clients to develop 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites 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 kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 a great deal 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 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will generally 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 possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might 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 provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically 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 customer 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 user gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website 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 most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their customer's machine, 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, many colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many benefits 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
Generally, a single machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 could also supply 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly accessible and reachable via the internet. This differs 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 each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The 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 often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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 lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based web 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 user might want to have 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is an important topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a potential client and can be a major subject when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. 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.