What is web hosting?

What is the difference between a normal Web hosting service and Amazon web services?

  • A normal web hosting service allows one to host a PHP web application using MySQL. This is good enough for most web applications. When should we use Amazon web services? What is the difference between a normal Web hosting service and Amazon web services?

  • Answer:

    This answer is broken up into two parts. First, I'll explain the difference between a web hosting provider and Amazon Web Services. Then, I'll explain why you may want to use Amazon Web Services (or infrastructure-as-a-service, colloquially known as "cloud technology"). The difference between traditional hosting and cloudA "normal" web hosting service usually consists of a couple options: Shared hosting Virtual private hosting (VPS) Dedicated hosting Essentially, a web host leases a server (or part of a server) to you for a fixed monthly cost. The web host themselves either owns or leases a data center, which is basically a warehouse of computers, all connected to a network, with one master terminal. Shared hostingIf you purchase shared hosting, the web host provisions a user account for you on a web server. Your user account is restricted to certain files, and you have (very) limited access to a small set of functionality -- say, FTP and email. Usually, this server runs one web server (usually Apache), which is configured with virtual hosts, mapping requests to your domain(s) that reach the server to files stored in your user directory, which it executes on your behalf. In short, you and (often many) other users are colocated on one physical machine. After so many users are on the machine, the web host will send new accounts to a different machine. Virtual private hosting (VPS)A VPS is similar in concept to shared hosting, but it's much more flexible. You'd use a VPS if you wanted to be economical. With a VPS, you get your own virtual server; that is, you get to connect your terminal to a virtual server and do whatever you want as a privileged user. You could install your own software on this server and use it for any number of things. The web host takes a physical machine and sets up a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor; that is, a virtualized operating system. This effectively allows the host to split one physical machine into several servers, each with its own virtual operating system. The host then grants you access to your own virtual machine. Despite this feeling like you have your own dedicated web server, it is still multi-tenant, as other customers will be powered by the same physical server. The hypervisor monitors and manages system resources, such as memory and disk space, and only allows the virtual operating system a specific slice of these resources. Dedicated hostingDedicating hosting is the purest form of web hosting. Simply, you lease a physical machine that lives in a data center. The web host manages and maintains it. They give you a terminal that connects to the machine, and you have privileged access to the hardware in its entirety. Compare to AmazonAmazon actually has 2 flavors of its infrastructure-as-a-service. Standard Dedicated Standard Amazon EC2A standard Amazon EC2 instance is basically a virtual private server. What's somewhat unique to Amazon in this respect is that they allow you to provision or retire many virtual servers through an API, without any intervention from Amazon. A traditional web hosting provider doesn't have the ability to do this; nor do they have the capacity, especially if they're simply leasing hardware from a real data center. These virtual servers usually don't coexist within the same physical machine, as each machine is multi-tenant in the Amazon data center. You can direct access to these machines as if they were dedicated servers. Dedicated Amazon EC2Amazon gives customers the option of choosing "dedicated" EC2 instances. In this configuration, a customer pays for all of the virtual hosts that may belong to a specific machine. This is chiefly to eliminate the issue of multi-tenancy, since hypervisors manage hardware resources (look into what "CPU steal" means to get an example of how the hypervisor interacts with a virtualized operating system). This is similar to dedicated servers, but has all of the same features and flexibility of a virtual private server. Read more here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/dedicated-instance.html. One important thing to note about dedicated EC2 servers is that they must run within a VPC (virtual private cloud). But VPC is a different facet of Amazon Web Services for another question. :) Why would I use AWS instead of a traditional web host?Many, many reasons. Here are a few. Google these. You have lots of reading to do. These are things that a traditional web host cannot provide. High-availability (eliminating SPOFs: single points of failure) Distributed infrastructure, reducing latency to all regions of the world Cost savings (scaling down hardware to avoid over-spending) On-demand infrastructure for scaling applications or tasks (adding servers or "horizontally scaling" to massively increase the hardware power available to your application) Resource planning convenience and cost savings. You don't have to run your own data center for internal or private servers, so your IT department doesn't have to make bulk purchases of servers which may never get used, or may be inadequate, and you don't have to pay an entire IT department to maintain that hardware -- you don't even have to pay an accountant to figure out how much hardware you can afford or how much you need to purchase. Read more about all the benefits of cloud technologies and some of the whitepapers and case studies: http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/.

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Other answers

If you're running a critical application that cannot afford downtime even for a few minutes, a cloud hosting solution such as AWS is better than a shared webhost. Also, if your website gets traffic spikes or uses a lot of resources on the shared hosting system, it could easily be suspended for violation of TOS of your webhost.

Samer Bechara

Web hosting covers a variety of companies that offer services ranging from shared hosting, to virtual privates servers (VPS) to dedicated servers. Others below have done a good job explaining what the differences are. Now, with Amazon Web Services (and competitors like Microsoft, Google, http://Atlantic.net (who I work for), Linode, and Digital Ocean), you are talking about IaaS (infastructure-as-a-service), which refers to a virtualized environment that is comprised of many servers,  working as a pool. It's a  technological framework rather than a  defined physical object. Cloud  hosting allows many different servers to  function as one unit for  storage and processing. The data and files  for your site are distributed  throughout hard disks that are integrated  and organized for optimized  efficiency, reliability, and speed (i.e.,  low latency). A cluster of  servers, managed through a cloud hosting  platform, draws on the  operating power of many machines. Hope this helps.

Keneth Bryant

Normal web hosting means: Shared Hosting Dedicated Virtual Private Server (VPS) They create servers on their end (not necessary). While Amazon Web Services provide servers.Their are two ways to host on Amazon. Directly host on AWS Host on AWS via Managed Cloud Hosting like http://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php

Mustaasam Saleem

Major difference between normal web hosting and cloud web hosting is that cloud hosting is for websites where a lot of users are online at a time and use various features simultaneously.Cloud hosting distributes traffic and load of websites.

Dharmendra K Gupta

Web hosts offer a service and Amazon offer servers, or Amazon offer infrastructure, but infrastructure alone is not a web hosting service.A quality web host will provide you with all the services you need to get a site online and keep it their. This may include ongoing management of your servers, software updates, monitoring etc. They will also provide ongoing advice of configuration changes or upgrades that may benefit you.AWS give you access to incredible unlimited infrastructure and amazing services built on top of that. As it's automated a single person could deploy huge and complex architectures and then change them around and scale up or down instantly as they please. It's game changing.Amazon won't help you or advise you at all on what your servers are doing. If your site suddenly slows down or starts intermittently responding with errors or gets compromised or whatever they will not give you any help. A traditional host might help you track down that you're getting 100 req/s brute force on your log in page, or that your database config is bad.With a traditional webhost there may be long lead times on new kit, or certainly long contracts. changes to your infrastructure may need to go through a sales team or account managers with perhaps negotiations on the price.

Oliver Burkill

One big advantage of cloud services is that they are scalable so you can scale your usage up or down. Depending on your traffic you can either increase or decrease the servers and other resources. Thus if you have your own resources your cost will increase as you don't require them all the time. But Cloud services allows us to use resources depending on ones need. Amazons EC2(here E stands for Elastic ) allows us such flexibility in usage. You can configure your own EC2 instance as follows- http://www.javainuse.com/devOps/chap3

Rameez Shaikh

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