Web hosting
Web hosting is a service that provides
internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the
web. Web-hosting is often provided as part of a general internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these services.
External links - Directories
Self-hosting
A
self-hosting software distribution is one which provides all necessary source code to enable itself to be re-compiled from scratch, including all of the necessary tool chains needed for its compilation.
Most Linux distributions are self-hosting.
Also (of a computer language): a computer language which is natively implemented in its own language. The programming languages C and Lisp are self-hosting.
See also: bootstrapping
Virtual hosting
Virtual hosting is a method that web servers use to host more than one
domain name on the same computer and
IP address.
With web browsers that support HTTP/1.1 (as most do), upon connecting to a webserver, they send the address that the user typed into their browser's address bar (the URL). The server can use this information to determine which webpage to show the user.
For instance, a server could be receiving requests for two domains, www.site1.com and www.site2.com, both of which resolve to the same IP address. For www.site1.com, the server would send the HTML file file from the directory /www/JoeUser/site1/, while requests for www.site2.com would make the server serve pages from /www/FrankUser/site2/.
Domain Name System
The Domain Name System, most often known as simply DNS, is a core feature of the Internet. It is a distributed database that handles the mapping between host names (domain names), which are more convenient for humans, and the numerical IP address, which a computer can use directly.
For example, www.wikipedia.org is a domain name and 130.94.122.199 the corresponding numerical internet address. The domain name system acts much like an automated phone book, so you can "call" www.wikipedia.org instead of 130.94.122.199.
So, it converts human-friendly names such as "www.wikipedia.org" into computer-friendly (IP) addresses such as 130.94.122.199.
DNS was first invented in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris; the original specifications are described in RFC 882. In 1987 RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 were published which updated the DNS specifcation and made RFC 882 and RFC 883 obsolete. Subsequent to that there have been quite a few RFCs published that propose various extensions to the core protocols.
DNS implements a hierarchical name space by allowing name service for parts of a name space known as zones to be "delegated" by a name server to subsidiary name-servers. DNS also provides additional information, such as alias names for systems, contact information, and which hosts act as mail hubs for groups of systems or domains.
The present restriction on the length of domain names is 63 characters, excluding the www. and .com or other extension. Domain names are also limited to a subset of ASCII characters, preventing many languages from representing their names and words correctly.
The Punycode-based IDNA system, which maps Unicode strings into the valid DNS character set, has been approved by ICANN and adopted by some registries as a workaround.
The DNS system is run by various flavors of DNS software, including:
- BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the most commonly used namedaemon.
- DJBDNS (Dan J Bernstein's DNS implementation)
- MaraDNS
- NSD (Name Server Daemon)
- PowerDNS
Any
IP computer network can use DNS to implement its own private name system. However, the term "domain name" is most commonly used to refer to domain names implemented in the public
Internet DNS system.
This is based on thirteen "root servers" worldwide, all but three of which are in the
United States of America. From these thirteen
root servers, the rest of the Internet DNS name space is delegated to other DNS servers which serve names within specific parts of the DNS name space.
An 'owner' of a domain name can be found by looking in the whois database: for most gTLDs a basic WHOIS is held by ICANN, with the detailed WHOIS maintained by the domain registry which controls that domain.
For the 240+ Country Code TLDs the position is usually that the registry holds the entire authorative WHOIS for that extension, as part of their many functions.
The current way the main DNS system is controlled is often criticized.
The most common problems pointed at are that it is abused by monopolies or near-monopolies such as VeriSign Inc., and problems with assignment of top-level domains.
Some also allege that many implementations of DNS server software fail to work gracefully with dynamically allocated IP addresses, although that is the failure of specific implementations and not failures of the protocol itself.
DNS uses TCP and UDP ports 53.
See also: cybersquatting, dynamic DNS, ICANN, DNSSEC
External links
Web server
The term
web server can mean one of two things:
- a computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers;
- a software program that is working as a daemon serving web documents.
The most common HTTP servers are:
The most commonly-used web server, Apache, with over 60% of market share as of March 2003, is available from the
Apache Software Foundation.
You can find the current web servers statistics from the
Netcraft Web Server Survey.
See also
simple:Web Server