06 - Web sites and Web Hosting

Note: In essence a website is just a set of files and folders

The first web page went live on August 6, 1991. It was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project and was made by Tim Berners-Lee. It ran on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

A website is hosted on a computer system known as a web server, also called an ________________________________ server. These terms can also refer to the software that runs on these systems which retrieves and delivers the web pages in response to requests from the website's users. Apache is the most commonly used web server software (according to Netcraft statistics) and Microsoft's IIS is also commonly used. Some alternatives, such as Nginx, Lighttpd, Hiawatha or Cherokee, are fully functional and lightweight.

As default the web server is given a default address called localhost

1. It can be cheaperto host your website locally as opposed to going
to an external host 

2. It is suitable (to use a Home PC) 
if the site is for personal or local network user use. 

3. You have total control as compared to the sort of control you would
have with an external host

1. Bandwidth
2. Always on (your computer would have to be always powered on) 
3. You would need an IP address for every customer 
4. You would need technical knowledge 
5. You would need to know how to create a virtual server from scratch
6. You would need to protect the site yourself (security) 
7. If the site required payments, you would have to set up payment gateways
8. Dynamic IP (no permament IP address would cause issues)

Note: Often they will not only provide storage but maintenance, backups, security and technical help

#1 Shared Web Hosting: Shared hosting means just that. Your website is
hosted on a server shared by other websites. The advantage of this setup 
is the shared cost. You can pay as little as $5-$10 per month for sharing
a super server with (probably) hundreds (or thousands) of other websites.   

#2  Dedicated Servers: When you have a dedicated server, it means you are 
renting one physical server from a hosting company. You can have full control
(called "root" permissions in Linux) if you want it.
With a dedicated server, you don't have to worry about other websites 
on a shared server taking up your resources and slowing your website down.
A dedicated server is generally the highest level of server you would need 
if your online business grows into a presence that is getting a lot of website
traffic  

#3Virtual Server: A virtual server is a server that shares hardware and software
resources with other operating systems (OS), versus dedicated servers.
Because they are cost-effective and provide faster resource control, 
virtual servers are popular in Web hosting environments        

#4 Cloud Based Web Hosting refers to a fairly new hosting technology 
that lets hundreds of individual servers work together so that it 
looks like one giant server. The idea is that as the need grows, the 
hosting company can just add more commodity hardware to make an ever 
larger grid or cloud.

The advantage of cloud-based web hosting is that if you get an unusually 
large amount of website traffic the web hosting plan can accommodate the 
surge of traffic - rather than shutting your website down.?