UNIT-5

Web Hosting

Web Hosting:-
Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page
onto the Internet. A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the
technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed in the Internet. Websites
are hosted, or stored, on special computers called servers. When Internet users want to view your
website, all they need to do is type your website address or domain into their browser. Their
computer will then connect to your server and your webpages will be delivered to them through the
browser.

Most hosting companies require that you own your domain in order to host with them. If you do not
have a domain, the hosting companies will help you purchase one.

Here are some features you should be expecting from your hosting provider:
Email Accounts As mentioned earlier, most hosting providers require users to have their
own domain name. With a domain name (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com)
 and email account features provided by your hosting company, you can
create domain email accounts (e.g. [email protected]).

FTP Access The use of FTP lets you upload files from your local computer to your
web server. If you build your website using your own HTML files, you
can transfer the files from your computer to the web server through FTP,
allowing your website to be accessed through the internet.

WordPress WordPress is an online website creation tool. It is a powerful blogging

Support and website content management system, which is a convenient way to
create and manage website. WordPress powers over 25% of websites on
the internet. Most hosting providers will tell you right away if their plans
are WordPress-compatible or not. The simple requirements for hosting
your WordPress websites include: PHP version 7 or greater; MySQL
version 5.6 or greater.

Types of web hosting

As technology has progressed, different types of web hosting have been introduced to meet
the different needs of websites and customers best. These include:

• Shared Web Hosting

• Dedicated Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Cloud
• Reseller

Let's look into the most popular web hosting services in more detail.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting is when a website is hosted on the same server as many other websites. Most
web hosting companies provide shared hosting. It’s cheap and easy to set-up which makes it a
good fit for new sites which don’t expect a lot of traffic in the short term. It’s best suited for
personal websites as well as those belonging to small and medium-sized businesses.

Anyone serious about digital marketing or running an online business should carefully review
their shared hosting options and make sure that your provider can offer services such as
Namecheap’s Business SSD hosting, which is designed specifically for e-commerce websites.
Shared hosting isn’t suitable for large sites with lots of traffic either. These sites need a
dedicated server to accommodate a suitable amount of resources to guarantee decent website
performance.

VPS Hosting

Virtual private servers (VPS) also known as virtual dedicated server (VDS), is when a virtual
server appears to each client as a dedicated server even though it’s actually serving multiple
websites. For this reason, VPS style hosting is considered to be the stepping stone between
shared hosting and getting your own dedicated machine. The main difference between shared
hosting and VPS is that clients have full access to configure the VPS which is much closer to
dedicated style hosting.

VPS is often used by smaller websites and organizations that want the flexibility of having a
dedicated server, without the high costs implied.
Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting (sometimes referred to as managed hosting or a dedicated server) provides

entire servers to rent. This type of hosting is comparatively expensive when placed side-by-
side with shared hosting plans; for this reason, it's only really used when a website has a lot
of traffic or when more server control is required.

There is more to dedicated hosting than providing a single website with entire server
equipment housed in a data center. It allows greater self-service server administration
facilities. This is considered a more flexible arrangement because it allows total control over
the server, its software and security systems. At the same time, however, you need to have the
technical expertise on-hand to manage the platform yourself.

Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is the latest hosting type to hit the market, and it’s become extremely popular
in recent years. This type of hosting operates across many interconnected web servers that
supply an affordable, scalable and reliable web infrastructure. Cloud hosting plans typically
offer unmetered, reliable bandwidth and an infinite amount of disk space for unlimited
domains which explains why so many large businesses are turning to the cloud. It’s an
effective method of running a website with resource-intensive applications or a large number
of content assets such as images, but it can have a much higher cost.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting where the account owner can use his or her allotted
hard drive space and bandwidth to host a website on behalf of third parties. The original
hosting account owner is the ‘reseller’ in this instance. Reseller hosting is beneficial when the
amount of space purchased isn’t required, and some of the allocated resources can be shared
with another party. Sharing disk space, bandwidth, CPU, etc. while getting a recurring source
of income.

Hosting providers offer specific reseller hosting plans to accommodate entrepreneurs

interested in this business practice. Buying a reseller hosting plan is also helpful for anyone
with multiple domains. You may design your own hosting packages for your websites or
clients gives the resources allocated to the reseller hosting account.

Registering Domain:-
Domain name registration is the act of reserving a name on the Internet for a certain period,
usually one year. It is important to know that this domain will remain yours for as long as you
renew it and there is no way to purchase a domain name forever.

Domain name registration is necessary for a website, an email or another web service.
However, you don’t have to always register a new domain name. Many companies allow you
to use subdomains of their domain names for a website, or you can have an email with their
primary domain (ex. yahoo.com, gmail.com).
Domains:-
A website domain is the name you type into your browser to get to a particular website.
Domains take the form “www.example.com”. This can be broken down into three parts:

www.
The www is generally optional, in that entering only “example.com” will still get you
to the same page as if you had added the “www.”
example
This, along with the final part are your host name. This middle part can be made up of
a combination of letters, numbers and hyphens (-). There are a few caveats: you can’t
start or end a name with a hyphen, because that would look silly. Your name also has
to include at least one letter, it can’t be all numbers. The domain can be up to 63
characters long, and is case-insensitive, which means that there’s no difference
between EXAMPLE.com and example.com.
.com
This is one of many domain extensions — or “top-level domains” — which you can
choose. You could also have a domain like “example.org” or “example.net” or
countless other variations. Each one has a specific meaning which we’ll delve into
below.

Possible Domain Extensions

There are the three big domain extensions, .com .net and .org that are seen all over the
internet.

Dot com domains are the most popular form — they denote any “commercial” website, but in
actuality are used for almost every type of site because “dot com” is thought of as being
synonymous for the internet. Dot net domains were originally for infrastructure-related site
like ISPs, but again are used for more than that nowadays. Many companies will register both
a .com and a .net version of their site. Dot org domains are ostensibly only to be used by non-
profit organisations. Anyone can get one, but if you are not running a non-profit organisation,
you shouldn’t really register a dot org.

Beyond the big three, there are dozens of other extensions you can register in. Most of these
are country-specific extensions. Almost every country will have their own extension. For
example, Britain uses .co.uk, Germany uses .de and Ireland uses .ie. If your site caters
specifically for people from a certain country, you should definitely get a country-specific
domain name. Optionally, you can also register the .com version as well, and redirect all
traffic from it to this country-specific one.

Many search engines also have country-specific versions, and they will weight local sites
more heavily than others. So, in a search on the Spanish version of Google, a site with a .es
extension will rank higher than the competition because their domain is more specific.

In 2001, a number of extra extensions were made available for various purposes, like .biz for
businesses, .info for informative sites, .jobs for employment-related sites etc. There is a full
list of top-level domains available.
Subdomains

Once you have your main domain name, you can have as many subdomains beneath it as you
like. The subdomain takes the place of the “www” — so we could have
“members.example.com”, or “archives.example.net”, or even “june.archives.example.net”.
Setting up subdomains can be a useful way to keep a site organised, or to use multiple servers
for a single site so that heavy traffic doesn’t overwhelm your single server.

Registrar:-
The registrar is the company that sets up your new domain name for you. Most registrars
charge roughly the same amount for domains, but there are some bargains to be had if you
know where to look.

Once you’ve registered a few domains you tend to stick with that registrar. Generic domains
ending in .com or .net will generally cost between $9 and $30. Country-specific domains will
often cost a little more. Some might involve a screening process, wherein you have to
produce some documentation to prove your business is actually being run from the country.

As for specific registrars, I’ve heard good things about a company called Dreamhost, who
have been very successful. If you use the promotional code “HTMLSOURCE” when you
sign up for hosting with them, you’ll get your first domain name free! Personally, I bought
this domain and hosting from pair networks, and their domain registrar PairNIC. I have had
no problems with them at all.

Name servers
you will need to point it towards your webspace. Every hosting computer connected to the
internet has what’s called an IP address. This is a unique set of numbers that will look
something like “72.14.207.99”. Rather than typing a domain name into your browser to get to
a site, you could just use the IP address all the time, but they can be pretty difficult to
remember! So, we need a system to point the domain name to the corresponding IP address
of the server it’s stored on.

Your hosts will likely help you with this, but what it basically involves is updating your
domain by adding two or more nameservers to it. These nameservers are machines constantly
connected to the internet that manage which addresses point to which sites, and will generally
have names like “ns123.example.com”. You add at least two so that if one of them goes
offline, your site doesn’t follow it, because the second nameserver can be used as a backup.
When you type a domain into your browser, a nameserver is queried to find the server to
download from.

Once this information has been updated, you will have to wait about 24 hours for the
nameserver information to spread — or “propagate” — around the internet. In this time you
can begin uploading your site. Once it has gone around, anyone in the world will be able to
type in your domain name and get to your site!

To create an email account:

 1. Log into cPanel.
2. In the Email section, click Email Accounts.
3. In the Email field, type your preferred username and select the domain name from the drop-
down menu below.

Note: The email name shadow is reserved and cannot be used for an email address.

4. In the Password fields, type the desired password twice.

5. Make a selection for Mailbox Quota.
6. Click Create Account.

The same steps work for creating email accounts for your primary domain, addon domains,
and subdomains. You cannot create email accounts with a script or via SSH.

Send Only Email (do-not-reply addresses)

Advanced email users will sometimes need a "Do not reply" email address (such as forum
moderators that need an address to send notifications). The following steps will allow you to
disable incoming email for an address. If you do not need SMTP access to that address, you
may skip the steps above.

To disable incoming mail for an address:

1. Log into cPanel.

2. In the Email section, click Email Forwarders.
3. Under Create an Email Account Forwarders click Add Forwarder.
4. On the Add a New Forwarder page:
1. Enter the email name and select the domain for the address.
2. Select Discard and send an error to the sender (at SMTP time).
3. Enter the failure message you would like users to receive.

Note: If you do not wish for users to receive an error message, click Advanced
Options and select Discard (Not Recommended).

4. Click Add Forwarder

FTP:-
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Using an FTP client is a method to upload, download,
and manage files on our server.

Technical Information:
FTP is a commonly used protocol for exchanging files over any network that supports the
TCP/IP protocol (such as the Internet or an intranet). There are two computers involved in an
FTP transfer: a server and a client. The FTP server, running FTP server software, listens on
the network for connection requests from other computers. The client computer, running FTP
client software, initiates a connection to the server. Once connected, the client can do a
number of file manipulation operations such as uploading files to the server, download files
from the server, rename or delete files on the server and so on. Virtually every computer
platform supports the FTP protocol. This allows any computer connected to a TCP/IP based
network to manipulate files on another computer on that network regardless of which
operating systems are involved (if the computers permit FTP access). There are many
existing FTP client and server programs, and many of these are free.

Use an FTP client:-

If you do not know how to use an FTP client, please use our step by step Setup Guides, as
seen on the FAQ page. You will need the following FTP login details to access your FTP
account through an FTP program:

Server (Host):
Remote Directory:
Username:
Password:

You were emailed the FTP login details when you signed up for your hosting account, but if
you no longer have that email you can view the FTP login settings and change the FTP
password by following these steps:

1. Login to your Account Manager at https://www.domainit.com/myaccount

2. Click on the domain name you would like to manage
3. Under "Service Details" you can view the FTP Hostname, FTP Username, and Remote
Directory
4. Then, to change the FTP password, click "Change Password" next to "FTP/Control Panel"

Important Notes:

• All regular files should be uploaded to the /public_html directory

• Name your homepage index.html and upload to the /public_html directory
• All cgi scripts should be uploaded to the /cgi-bin directory
• Servers are case sensitive (e.g. imAge.gIF MUST point to a file called imAge.gIF).
• Make sure your FTP program is set to FTP, not SFTP

3. Common FTP Errors

Permission Denied in FTP program: This is because you are not uploading to the correct
location. Be sure to add the "remote directory" of /public_html.

Connection Refused: Double check your FTP settings (server/hostname, username, and
password). You are not logging in correctly, or the account is not yet setup.

Website Maintenance Plan Is a Circle

website maintenance should be a consistent part of your business. It grows on itself, and if
not correctly implemented, can cause some serious problems and setbacks to your potential
growth and business health.

Staying on top of website health takes awareness and organization. This is particularly the
case for a large site with hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.

With the introduction of new tools to make website building easier, website sizes are growing
each year. While it’s easy to add pages to most websites, it’s not as easy to keep all of your
pages in a good state.

All that to say: keep on top of your website maintenance.

Important to Do Website Maintenance:-

Many new businesses already have a lot on their plates without worrying about constantly
checking in on their website. It’s tempting to buy a domain name, throw up something
temporary, and just worry about it later. There are many reasons why this is not a good idea.
Maintaining a current, healthy, and active website is important for a number of reasons.

SEO

The whole point to starting a business is to have customers, clients, or an audience. To drive
traffic to your website, you’ll need to keep it regularly updated.

Google wants to rank websites that have the most relevant and up-to-date information on
their search engine results page . They may even de-index your website entirely if it hasn’t
been updated recently enough and if they suspect it has been infected by malware. You must
keep your website regularly updated with current content, news, keywords, and articles in
order to rank well in search results.

Regularly website maintenance is invaluable for SEO strategy.

Customer Attraction/Engagement

If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it’s important to keep those potential
customers. If they aren’t able to find what they are looking for, current information and
relevant content, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest quickly. In order for your website
to be the useful tool you want, you’ll need to ensure it is free from types and grammar issues,
has any and all information a customer could want, and looks engaging and consistent.
Security

This is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar,
particularly if your website is storing any form of customer information. If you are using a
website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you must ensure that you are installing
regular software updates and security patches. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to find
and target websites that have sat dormant for too long.

Corporate Image

It’s becoming more and more simple to create a website that looks well-designed and
professional. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies.
If your website doesn’t deliver on the promise of professionalism, your customers will often
go elsewhere.

Your Sanity

Your website is a very important element of your business. If it is up-to-date and running
smoothly, it can be a valuable support and asset. If it is not in a good state, it can cost you
dearly. Once you are behind on your maintenance needs, it can be quite the process to bring
the website back up to speed. Sometimes, if your maintenance has been ignored for too long,
it is easier just to scrap everything and rebuild from the scratch.

Do yourself and your business a favor by staying on top of your website. This will repay you
with simple ease of mind.

Keep up with Trends in Design and Technology

The sleeker your website is, the more you’ll convince potential customers that you are their
ultimate choice. If you’re staying on top of your website maintenance, you’ll also have the
opportunity to be an early adopter of new website technology that will help the back-end run
more smoothly. If you’re installing software updates regularly, you’ll be able to take
advantage of new features that install along with the updates.

You’ll also be able to tweak your design to stay on top of the latest website looks. It’s far
more tempting to employ a company with a polished and modern website than one that looks
like it hopped on a time travel device from 2003.