GreatChinaWebHosting.info is Blog sharing chinese language, and learning experiences.
Title
Free Web Hosting Review, Free WebSite Guide, Free Web Hositng Provider Wiki
Description
Excerpted from the website description:
- File hosting service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Types of Internet hosting service
* Full-featured hosting services
o Virtual private server
o Dedicated hosting
o Colocation centre
* Web hosting
o Free hosting
o Shared hosting
o Clustered hosting
o Reseller hosting
o Application-specific
+ Blog hosting
+ Guild hosting
+ Image hosting
+ Video hosting
+ Wiki farms
* File hosting
* Remote backup service
* Game server hosting
* DNS hosting
* E-mail hosting
A file hosting service, online file storage service, or online media center is an Internet hosting service specifically designed to host static content, typically large files that are not web pages. Typically they allow web and FTP access. They can be optimized for serving many users (as is implied by the term "hosting") or be optimized for single-user storage (as is implied by the term "storage"). Related services are video sharing, virtual storage and remote backup. Contents [hide]
* 1 Uses
o 1.1 Software file hosting
o 1.2 Personal file storage
o 1.3 Content caching
* 2 Storage
* 3 Services offered
* 4 File mirroring
* 5 One-click hosting
* 6 Comparison of notable file hosting services
* 7 See also
* 8 External links
* 9 References
[edit] Uses
[edit] Software file hosting
Shareware authors often use file hosting services to serve their software. The inherent problem with free downloads is the huge bandwidth cost. These hosts also offer additional services to the authors such as statistics or other marketing features.
[edit] Personal file storage
Personal file storage services are aimed at private individuals, offering a sort of "network storage" for personal backup, file access, or file distribution. Users can upload their files and share them publicly or keep them password-protected.
Prior to the advent of personal file storage services, off-site backup services were not typically affordable for individual and small office computer users.
Sometimes people prefer hosting their files on a publicly accessible HTTP server. In this case, they generally choose paid hosting, and use their hosting for this purpose. Many free hosting providers do not allow the storage of files for non-website-related use.
[edit] Content caching
Content providers who potentially encounter bandwidth congestion issues may use services specialized in distributing cached or static content. It is the case for companies with a major Internet presence.[1]
[edit] Storage
Most online file storage services offer space on a per-gigabyte basis, and sometimes include a bandwidth cost component as well. Usually these will be charged monthly or yearly. Some companies do offer the service for free, relying on advertising revenue. Some hosting services do not place any limit on how much space your account can consume. Some services require a software download which makes files only available on computers which have that software installed, others allow users to retrieve files through any web browser. With the increased inbox space offered by webmail services, many users have started using their webmail service as an online drive. Some sites offer free unlimited file storage but have a limit on the file size.
Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the benefits of co-locating their mission-critical equipment within a data centre. Colocation is becoming increasingly popular because of the time and cost savings a company can realize as a result of using shared data centre infrastructure. Significant benefits of scale (large power and mechanical systems) result in large colocation facilities, typically 5,000-10,000 m² (50,000 to 100,000 square feet). With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, Internet, ASP and content providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business.
Additionally, customers reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses. Moreover, by outsourcing network traffic to a colocation service provider with greater bandwidth capacity, web site access speeds should improve considerably.
Major types of colocation customers are:
* Web commerce companies, who use the facilities for a safe environment and cost-effective, redundant connections to the Internet * Major enterprises, who use the facility for disaster avoidance, offsite data backup and business continuity * Telecommunication companies, who use the facilities to interexchange traffic with other telecommunications companies and access to potential clients
Most network access point facilities provide colocation.
[edit] Services offered
Most colocation centres offer different types of services to customers ranging from dedicated suites/rooms or cages to smaller racks or partial racks. Some colocation centres also offer some degree of service level agreements to support a wide range of computer and network related services, for example, server reboots, hardware replacements and software updates.
There are a few key differences between a dedicated server and colocation servers. Dedicated servers tend to be owned and rented out, while a colocation server is one that the client owns.
Some colocation centres feature a "meet-me-room" where the different carriers housed in the centre can efficiently exchange data. Most peering points sit in colocation centres. These sites are often used for web hosting. Most colocation centres have high levels of physical security and multiple redundant power and humidity/air-conditioning systems.
Confusingly, one company can operate a colocation centre, another can provide the bandwidth, whereas a third company would rent a cage inside the centre, renting out racks to hosting providers which would rent the servers themselves to actual clients. Any and all of those companies will claim ownership of the facility and will feature photos and descriptions of it on their web sites. At the actual physical location various ID cards with various logos will be present, including those of the company that built/rents/owns the actual building.
[edit] File mirroring
In 2007, a new type of file hosting site emerged known as a file mirror or file spreading engine. These services allow users to upload their file to the hosting servers. The user's file is then distributed to multiple web hosts without using the user's bandwidth. For more information, see Mirror (computing).
[edit] One-click hosting
One-click hosting generally describes web services that allow internet users to easily upload one or more files from their hard drives (or from a remote location) onto the one-click host's server free of charge.
Most such services simply return a URL which can be given to other people, who can then fetch the file later on. As of 2005 these sites have drastically increased in popularity, and subsequently, many of the smaller, less efficient sites have failed. Many internet forums exist in order to share such links; this type of file sharing has, to a degree, taken over from P2P filesharing services[2].
The sites make money through advertising or charging for premium services such as increased downloading capacity, removing any wait restrictions the site may have or prolonging how long uploaded files remain on the site. Many sites implement a CAPTCHA to prevent automated downloading.
==Additional Information==A virtual private server (VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS) is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.
The practice of partitioning a single server so that it appears as multiple servers has long been common practice in mainframe computers, but has seen a resurgence lately with the development of virtualization software and technologies for other architectures. Contents [hide]
* 1 Overview
* 2 Uses
* 3 Virtual private server hosting
o 3.1 Managed Hosting
o 3.2 Unmanaged Hosting
o 3.3 Unmetered Hosting
* 4 Virtualization software
* 5 See also
[edit] Overview Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)
The physical server boots normally. It then runs a program that boots each virtual server within a virtualization environment (similar to an emulator). The virtual servers have no direct access to hardware and are usually booted from a disk image.
There are two kinds of virtualizations: software based and hardware based. In a software based virtualization environment, the virtual machines share the same kernel and actually require the main node's resources. This kind of virtualization normally has many benefits in a web hosting environment because of quota incrementing and decrementing in real time with no need to restart the node. The main examples are Xen,Virtuozzo, HyperVM, Vserver, and OpenVZ which is the core kernel of both Virtuozzo and HyperVM.
In a hardware based virtualization, the virtualization mechanism partitions the real hardware resources. In typical implementations, no burst and/or realtime quota modification is possible; the limits are hard and can only be modified by restarting a virtual machine instance[citation needed]. This kind of environment is potentially more secure in the sense that it is less subject to "Quality of Service crosstalk" between VM instances[citation needed]; on the other hand, its security is typically dependent on the correctness of a larger and more complicated Trusted Computing Base[citation needed]. It is more commonly used in enterprise/commercial deployments[citation needed]. Examples include Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware ESX Server, and Xen.
[edit] Uses
Virtual private servers bridge the gap between shared web hosting services and dedicated hosting services, giving independence from other customers of the VPS service in software terms but at less cost than a physical dedicated server. As a VPS runs its own copy of its operating system, customers have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, and can install almost any software that runs on the OS. Certain software does not run well in a virtualized environment, including firewalls, anti-virus clients, and indeed virtualizers themselves; some VPS providers place further restrictions, but they are generally lax compared to those in shared hosting environments. Due to the number of virtualization clients typically running on a single machine, a VPS generally has limited processor time, RAM, and disk space.
Due to their isolated nature, VPSes have become common sandboxes for possibly-insecure public services or update testing. For example, a single physical server might have two virtual private servers running: one hosting the production-level (live) website, and a second which houses a copy of it. When updates to crucial parts of software need to be made, they can be tested in the second VPS, allowing for detailed testing to be conducted without requiring several physical servers.
Virtual private servers are also sometimes employed as honeypots, allowing a machine to deliberately run software with known security flaws without endangering the rest of the server. Multiple honeypots can be quickly set up via VPSes in this fashion.[citation needed]
[edit] Virtual private server hosting
A growing number of companies offer virtual private server hosting, or virtual dedicated server hosting as an extension for Web hosting services. Some web hosting companies call a Virtual Private Server a Virtual Dedicated Server/Dynamic Dedicated Server or the other way around.
[edit] Managed Hosting
Tools are provided to monitor and control the virtual machine.
[edit] Unmanaged Hosting
Typically only minimal services are provided, such as ssh console and reboot. Unmanaged VPS hosting is generally less expensive than managed VPS hosting.
[edit] Unmetered Hosting
Similar to unmanaged hosting but a fixed bitrate is offered so that it is not possible to exceed a monthly budget.
[edit] Virtualization software
For some of the software packages commonly used to provide virtualization, see comparison of virtual machines.
