GUIDE to WEB HOSTING INTRODUCTION the Internet Is a Delicious Sprawl of Fascinating Websites, Catering to Our Every Wish and Whim
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GUIDE TO WEB HOSTING INTRODUCTION The Internet is a delicious sprawl of fascinating websites, catering to our every wish and whim. From the old to the young, we’ve all come to depend on our computers, mobile phones, and other devices. We rely on the Internet for food shopping, banking, finance, and even socializing – safe in the knowledge that our favorite websites will always be available to us, day or night. Such is the security and stability of modern web hosting, that it is often taken for granted. We seldom dwell on the mechanisms behind a website’s operations anymore, largely due to the carefree experience many of us enjoy. Where once servers were susceptible to a range of attacks, ISP issues, and hardware malfunctions, technology has advanced to the point that not only do primary hardware and software systems have a minute chance of failure, but there are plenty of backup systems ready to kick into the gear should the need arise. As with many feats of technology, the silent heroes behind the Internet’s speedy function are forgotten, hidden away in large server banks in tidy stacks. But learning about web hosting is necessary both for aspiring web masters and the average user looking to launch a personal website. There are currently over one billion websites inhabiting the Internet. Flashback to 1996, and this number was a diminutive 100,000 websites. Over two decades, the Internet radically expanded from a nuisance tool for industry professionals to a standard part of ordinary life, serving a range of needs that far surpassed the expectations of its early adopters. Websites evolved from repositories of information to end-to-end solutions for an endless number of conveniences and needs, often substituting or rendering obsolete traditional ways of buying, interacting, socializing, and generally functioning. Street retail, for example, has experienced a sharp decline of foot traffic over the past two decades precisely because of the momentous rise of online retail, with companies such as Amazon having conquered many shopping markets. Whereas in the early years, the Internet struck many seasoned professionals as more of a consumer ‘trend’, online retail has grown to a point where delivery is no longer an obstacle, and the age-old superstitions about online credit card use are a thing of the past. Younger generations are more trusting of websites than their predecessors, even to a fault. Similar impact can be seen in the world of social media and instant messengers, reshaping how we communicate with our friends, families, schools, employers, and even the companies we purchase from. Even traditional broadcast TV has faced challenge after challenge from on-demand entertainment options provided through services such as Netflix. And with each development and added convenience, our dependency has grown. If website servers suddenly ceased to function, our world would plunge into a figurative darkness – a digital blindness caused by little more than a loss of access. Because creating the reality of these expansive websites are a host of web servers, operating quietly and discreetly, often hidden away in what are known as server banks – aisled rooms where servers run 24/7 in optimal temperatures, facilitating the readily available access we’ve come to expect. Modern digital life is sustained by a host of such servers. And as the capabilities of our favorite websites extend, so too must the supporting systems. Whereas in 1996, a website would expect to hold little more than a few megabytes worth of data, in information and rudimentary graphics, services such as Netflix require servers capable of hosting thousands of terabytes worth of data, with upload streaming capabilities to match. In fact, it is reported that Netflix accounts for a third of the consumer Internet traffic in North America during peak times. Every website needs to be stored, or hosted, somewhere in the world. In the simplest sense, the Internet is a web of such servers, spanning the entire globe and continually communicating with one another. This guide will explain how to attach your website to that web. HISTORY In general terms, the Internet is built upon server connections. Just as a computer must first be built, housed, and powered before a connection can be established, so must a website. Before the World Wide Web, the first file transfer protocols were developed alongside the ARPANET – a rudimentary host-to-host communication network, which in its founding days primarily served electronic messengering traffic. Along with the creation of the Domain Name System (DNS), which enabled computers and servers to distinguish between one another, the ARPANET is widely recognized as the beginning of the modern Internet. The File Transfer Protocol (FPC) specification was later defined in 1973, enabling file transfers over a network connection. Back then, there were only a handful of computers connected to the ARPANET – serving a hardy crew of pioneering developers. Whereas we often take the Internet for granted, these first seminal computer-to-computer connections were ground-breaking, and heralded a new dawn of possibility. Still, it wasn’t until two decades later that the Internet truly began to bloom. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee proposed to build a HyperText, which would be called the “WorldWideWeb”. Essentially, this would be a ‘web’ of ‘hypertext documents’, or HTML pages, viewable via a browser. HTTP was already well into development at this point, and soon after, in 1991, the first webpage was created. The eponymous World Wide Web became first publicly available on August 6th 1991. In those early days, websites were but shadows of their modern offering. The first websites were written in plain HTML, and often included nothing more than text and basic color-coded backgrounds. After all, it wasn’t until 1995 that the percentage of world Internet users first reached 1%1. In 1991, though publicly available, it was still transitioning through an experimentation phase – as early adopters began to realize what the Internet might become. It’s fair to say that launching your own website wasn’t for the faint of heart, and remained exclusive to the IT savvy. Websites had to be hosted from a personal server. It was not until much later that web hosting services became commercially available, such as GeoCities and Angelfire, which were responsible for massively boosting the number of websites. Over the next decade numerous additional hosting services became available, extending their client offering to cloud services, private email domains, and do-it-yourself block-build customizable pages. Website’s capabilities flourished with rapidly improving hardware and software, as well as newer versions of the HTML protocol (such as subsequent versions of HTML). The original GeoCities offered what was then a ground- breaking 1MB of data, versus the 35KB offered by Angelfire. As computing hardware rapidly developed, so too did the potential of a web server. Audio and video became staple parts of a website’s offering, which was certainly not the case in the Internet’s founding years. Websites increasingly became more sophisticated, and web hosting services enabled ordinary users to access in-built functions previously locked away due to the complexity of development. To put the scale of supporting hardware into context, by 2008 users were enjoying an average of 171GB of web host storage – 1,115 times more than was available a decade earlier in 1998. 2 Throughout the first decade of the millennium, web hosting services became the standard for hosting both personal and business websites. In the latter case, hosting services helped facilitate the changing face of online business, not only by expanding online functions, for example, through ecommerce capabilities, but through 1 http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ 2 http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article/2012/02/history-web-hosting-infographic content distribution networks (CDNs). In truth, ‘hosting’ is just part of the service provided by many web hosting companies; in fact, much of the differentiation now owes to the support different services provide in creating, maintaining, and promoting your website. WHAT IS WEB HOSTING? The basic principles behind web hosting aren’t all that different from an ordinary computer. On your computer, files are stored locally and can be accessed by you at any particular time. Web pages, on the other hand, are a collection of files stored on a more powerful machine, with a connection powerful enough to facilitate simultaneous access. And there’s the rub – web pages are intended for general public access both day and night. Of course, web servers (i.e. the computers responsible for hosting websites) are configured differently to personal computers, normally relying on software specifically designed for multi and simultaneous network connections. Websites are comprised of numerous web pages, which collectively (counted in the billions) comprise the modern World Wide Web. Web hosting is the term given to describe the software and systems in place to ensure the availability of each and every webpage, typically subsumed within the definition of ‘web hosting services’ and their respective providers. Naturally, it’s a huge industry. As websites have become more sophisticated, supporting systems have had to keep up the pace. Traffic for popular websites can easily exceed millions of individual visits per day, and sometimes billions. Facebook, for example, has a staggering 1.13 billion active users each day.3 This requires a whole lot of server power, spread across numerous server banks around the world within a CDN (Content Distribution Network, which we will talk about later on). Websites themselves don’t require million-dollar supporting equipment to be available. The cost of maintenance isn’t necessarily relative to the website itself, but rather the amount of traffic it can expect to receive (and the sort of activity users get up to).