Yahoo Website Hosting
Yahoo Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to do this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design 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 demand for organizations, both large 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 most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website calls for a more inclusive 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 customers 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed 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 kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for different reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 customer gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user 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 user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. 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 server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client assumes they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered 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 could also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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 website 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 as in the event of a 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. The scheduled downtime is often 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime stats. Many 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 sometimes offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may 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 often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, internet security is a very important topic. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a prospective customer and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.