Yellow Pages Website Hosting
Yellow Pages Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, 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
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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was complicated 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 companies had the budget or capability to complete this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build 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 grew, 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site needs 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 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 Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. 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 sometimes sell shared web hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit 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 provide the tech 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 shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might 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. Customers are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 customer gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer often 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 organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer 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 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 alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, 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 charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer guesses they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of users).
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 placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update 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 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 website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often 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 available 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Quite a number of 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 often provided as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. 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 typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user may want to obtain 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. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is a very important topic. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major component when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.