Hosting

What is Hosting

The virtual hosting service means the service of hosting site files on the server on which the software is running, which is necessary to process requests to these files (web server). As a rule, the virtual hosting service includes the provision of space for mail, databases, DNS, file storage, etc., as well as support for the functioning of the corresponding services. Database hosting, file hosting, email hosting, DNS services can be provided separately as independent services, or enter the virtual hosting service.

Physical hosting (server hosting, server hosting) refers to services for placing server or other telecommunication equipment on the provider's specialized site with connection to communication channels - Colocation, if the equipment belongs to the client or Dedicated, if the equipment is rented from the provider.

Hosting services can be divided into:

• Virtual Hosting (or just Hosting)
• Virtual dedicated server (or VPS, aka VDS)
• Rent a dedicated server

How can Hosting companies differ, what should you pay attention to when choosing?

Very simple, and at the same time difficult to answer this question. Usually, for most, the first factor is, of course, the price of the service. But, if you study this issue, compare different offers, then, in market conditions, and a fairly large number of Hosting Providers, you can come to the conclusion that the prices are very similar.

A good tip will be to see reviews of Hosting companies, what do others think? The lack of feedback shows that the company is new, usually such are bypassed. The presence of only positive reviews is also alarming, there will always be different opinions in a large normal company, you need to study them and try to understand, come to an intermediate conclusion about the company. And after that, we will ask the question about the quality of the hosting services provided, and the approach of the hosting company to the implementation of hosting.

Extremely important is round-the-clock and adequate hosting support so that you can call, write off at any time, and solve the problems that have arisen now, and not on Monday morning.

In order for sites to work quickly and without interruptions, there must be modern and high-quality equipment in the hosting company, with the implementation of backup recovery of everything that is only used in the provision of Hosting services (power supply, Internet communication channels, equipment cooling, sites themselves).

The key to the success of the hosting company is its own Data Center (DPC), which is equipped with expensive equipment and meets the highest modern quality standards. Many companies that do not have their own Data Center rent equipment in the largest Data Centers in Moscow or St. Petersburg. The disadvantages of such a scheme of work are that free access to such Centers is limited, and if something breaks down, you need to write a pass, go there, solve the problem yourself. All this increases the downtime of sites, as a result, it negatively affects the seo-promotion and inefficiency of the advertising campaign or SMM conducted during this period. Accordingly, the attractiveness of the virtual hosting services provided by such companies is reduced.

Now, let's look at technical options for hosting:

The first option for creating hosting is to take a regular server and place all services on it, in most cases this is a typical solution for several sites, it does not require many costs, all services are placed together, such as: web server, database server, mail system.

<a name="1"></a>
(Figure 1)

A more difficult option is when the database service is transferred to a separate server, that is, the load on processing requests to the database is transferred to a separate server, thereby unloading the content and mail server itself.

<a name="2"></a>
(Figure 2)

The system is even more complicated when all the main services are distributed across individual physical servers without interfering with each other in operation.

<a name="3"></a>
(Figure 3)

Of all the above systems, there are disadvantages and advantages.
For example, in <a href="#1" class="dotted">Figure 1</a> everything is on the same server, it is convenient to administer and control, but this also gives disadvantages. Suppose a lot of requests begin to arrive at the server that force the server to generate dynamic content, and to create content you need to use database resources, so in this case, with poor development, a very unpleasant incident can happen.
Its essence is that the received request to the web server generates a request to the database, which for various reasons can be executed for a long time, while consuming a fairly large amount of system resources as a whole. And so another request comes to the web server, and yet, and yet, as a result, the server works slower and slower, trying to process all requests. As a result, the operation of the entire server will be paralyzed, and even users who request content not related to the dynamic configuration may not receive it due to the overloaded system as a whole.

The second option (<a href="#2" class="dotted">Fig. 2</a>), also at first glance solves the problems of the first case, but here you can get another problem. Once in my practice, I observed the work of the CMS system, which required about 17,000 requests to the database. Due to the fact that it took less than 0.01 seconds to process one request to the database, in total it was about 120-200 seconds, which, in general, is not at all acceptable. If the site page opens for more than a few seconds, the most likely visitor will leave the site. Using this example, I showed that with a large number of queries to the database, overhead, as if not noticeable in most cases, causes a very big problem.
But just in the first case (<a href="#1" class="dotted">Figure 1</a>), requests could be executed once every 10 faster, since much less network services would be spent, since requests passed directly through the network stack of the operating system.

The third option (<a href="#3" class="dotted">Figure 3</a>) seems to be an ideal of perfection in general, but note that the administrator needs to control three servers already, each of which may have its own problems that can affect the operation of the entire complex. Although, of course, everything is better, if suddenly you are flooded with Spam, and the mail server cannot stand it, the site (s) will work as before, this will not hurt them

You may think how easy it is to make a system for hosting sites, there is no need for big costs. There are a lot of free or paid server management systems on the Internet that allow you not to go into the intricacies of system administration. Yes, I agree, with a small number of sites and not much activity on them, everything will work normally, and you can sleep peacefully.

Surprises will be expected a little later, suppose one of the sites begins to grow and becomes very popular and you have to make a choice, or you beat from morning to evening over the stable operation of the entire system, or you will have to refuse the owner of a popular resource in order to maintain the normal operation of other resources.

Of course, you can place a loaded resource on another server, separating it from all other clients. But again, you will need to buy another set of equipment and be ready that now you have a larger fleet of servers and you need to monitor all this economy, report to you on failures that occur in time and apply the necessary measures in a timely manner to stabilize various situations.

To all our resources, it is worth adding new systems, monitoring systems, which, by the way, also require tracking themselves.

At first glance, life is getting better, but, alas, these are not all surprises, the more clients become, the greater the load on systems, and it may happen that one database server will not be enough, it is necessary to install a new one.
Customers are not particularly eager to delve into the art of programming and make quite serious mistakes that cause systems to overload. As we sometimes say: "You can fry fried eggs on such servers": -)

You face a choice of what to do next?
What to do next is a rather difficult question, since it is tied, both on the commercial part and on the moral and ethical, I think this is the topic of a separate article, where you can philosophize on all aspects of this issue.

Let's go back to technical issues. "What else can be improved?" you ask. In principle, there is no limit to perfection, let's first divide your system into two parts "front-end" and "back-end" (<a href="#4" class="dotted">Fig. 4</a>)

<a name="4"></a>
(Figure 4)

All requests come to "front-end" and then this server is distributed between the rest of the "back-end" servers. You can think what a good scheme this is, but in fact, what will happen if the "front-end" breaks down? That's right, no amount of "back-end" will help save the situation if there is no "front-end" server. This means that you need to provide some alternative option for such a case.

To do this, you need to go up to the level above, to the level of routing equipment, to the very place where at the IP level a packet has reached within reach of your system, but has not yet had time to reach your servers and you have a chance to intervene in the process of where to send this packet.

By the way, this place is quite interesting and has many solutions.
As an example, if your router has WCCP (Web Cache Communication Protocol) support, then you can use it for these purposes. Its essence will boil down to the fact that if your "front-end" is alive and regularly responds to requests from the router or notifies it of its life, the router intercepts the packet and sends it to the "front-end." If the connection with "front-end" is lost, then the router directs requests directly to one or many "back-end," it all depends on your desire and the type of settings.

Even if you do not have an expensive router, then there remains a large field for action. A regular server can be turned into a router using various systems such as ipfw, iptables, pf can achieve a similar result, I would say even more than in the above case. You can control the rules here yourself when writing fairly simple programs. If you also connect to this, for example, CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol), then you can take a double of such a server, in case of failure of one server, the work will be picked up by another, thereby increasing the reliability of the system as a whole.
Moreover, having the above systems, it will be easier for you to deal with such a frequent problem recently as DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service). Since you will not allow negative traffic to hit the main servers of the system, thereby protecting them

again the question arose - "What else can be improved?"
Yes, not a problem, let's take on the postal system, in the first stage, when you have just started everything, it is most important not to make simple mistakes. For example, for all mail protocols, give clients the same name of the type of mail.domain.ru, you will still say one server. But in the future, if you expand, you will have to more difficult to divide this name according to different protocols, so do not be lazy, make separate names for different protocols: smtp, pop, imap, even if they still lead to one server.

The next step is to separate the smtp protocols from pop and imap, and for greater reliability, you can divide smtp into two separate servers for incoming and outgoing mail.
Also, with an increase in the number of incoming or outgoing messages, it will be possible to increase the number of smtp servers. In the case of an outgoing message server, you can use the indication of several ip addresses in the dns server, and then, according to the round-robin algorithm, the outgoing server will be selected by the client according to the principle of sorting addresses in a circular cycle, thereby distributing the load between the servers.

You can do the same with incoming mail servers, but you have another tool for controlling the process, where to deliver mail going to your clients' domains. This is the MX entry type in dns that points to the mail-exchange servers that serve mail for the domain. For this type of record, you can specify the priority for each server or multiple servers, thereby controlling in what order and to which server the letter will be delivered for your client.

Imap and pop protocols are a little easier, in fact, they must live near a large enough mail store so as not to limit customers to the size of boxes. That is, any server with large disks is suitable for this purpose, in the future it is certainly better to use a raid system for reliable storage of mail, if you charge customers money for this, then you must definitely think about reliable storage.

We had fun with the mail, what else could we do...
And there are also options here, for example CRON (task scheduler for running your programs). Typically, energy-intensive and complex tasks for processing some kind of analytics or system maintenance operations are placed in it. And this can also cause a problem, if not on disks, so on memory or processor, which can prevent the output of content from the web server. Here, as an option, you can offer the following.

The file system can be moved to another server, for example, over NFS, and cron jobs can be served on it. You can also access this server ssh, since the operation of this server is not related to the operation of the main web server. Here you can allow clients to use various programs that you did not allow to use before, for example, different compilers. It makes no sense to take ftp here, yet downloading files should be closer to the storage and, as a rule, ftp does not cause problems either by disk, processor, or memory.

If it becomes boring again, then you can start modernizing the "back-end" servers.
Most often, such servers are reconfigured, so as not to force this, there are several ways.
The first is the creation of a virtual mapping of site names, through the paths in the file system in which the site name will appear, but in this case it will be extremely difficult to adjust the settings of certain sites.
The second option is to write your module, which will dynamically create and cache a database-based configuration. Here, too, you should not be particularly carried away, since if you choose the mysql or pgsql database, it will be possible to paralyze either their work or, in the event of their breakdown, paralyze the work of sites, it is better to use either BDB or CDB. That is, use an intermediate database to store settings and update them if changes have occurred in the central database.

When you have coped with the above task, you can choose something else.
Let's think about how we can give all sites a separate ip address if necessary. If you have not one and not two sites, but several thousand, then there is not a simple situation. It is necessary to register all ip to certain sites, a very unimpressive activity, in addition to prescribing a web server in configs, it is necessary to prescribe this in the configs of the operating system itself, which even with some kind of automation, then it will look terribly ugly.

Here we chose a slightly different solution, this is the creation of a reverse-proxy with cunning mapping, its essence boils down to the following, a route is created on the router for a fairly large network, which is sent to the address of our proxy server. On the proxy server itself, the rule is to redirect all packets going to us in this network to a certain port, and redirect it, that is, leaving information about the src and dst address in the packets. Then our proxy server, receiving this packet, sees where it is sent, again through an intermediate CDB file, and determines which of the "back-end" content is on this request, sends this request there and sends the response to the client.

By the same analogy, you can generally distribute IPV6 addresses to all sites, probably in your database, where the list of sites is stored, each site has its own unique numerical identifier, as a rule, this is an integer, and this is only 32 bits, for ipv6 this is a real trifle. That is, the network will be enough for all your tricks/96, 4 billion addresses.: -)
The essence of the idea is as follows, packets are intercepted and sent again to the server's port of discovery, only in this case we take the last 4 bytes of the ipv6 address, which is a unique site identifier, then it will not be possible to look into the database again and find where to send this request already at the top of ipv4.

If you are not tired of reading all this yet, then in the end we will get the following picture:

Source: What is Hosting and why does the site need it?

Register of hosting providers in Russia

Main article: Registry of hosting providers in Russia

Chronicle

2024: Hosting services have risen in price by 20-30% in Russia

On October 18, 2024, it became known that the largest Russian hosting providers announced a significant increase in prices for their services. Value growth averaged between 20% and 30%, the industry's steepest price jump in years.

According to Forbes, Masterhost has raised prices by 20% since October 4, 2024, Ru-Center plans to increase the cost of services for individuals from November 12, 2024, and Timeweb raised prices by an average of 30% in June. Experts predict that following the market leaders, other providers will also be forced to revise their pricing policy.

𝓲

Freepik

Sergey Ryzhkov, head of the Reg.ru company's hosting and professional services department, noted that several factors influenced the price increase. Among them are an increase in the cost of equipment by 20-30% on an annualized basis, an increase in software prices, especially in the field of information security, as well as the need to comply with new legislative requirements.

In December 2023, a law came into force obliging hosting providers to deploy their infrastructure in Russia, identify customers and install equipment for access to power services. According to Ryzhkov's estimates, the cost of fulfilling these requirements amounted to about ₽100 million for large companies and ₽10 -20 million for small hosters.

The general director of the hosting provider RUVDSNikita Tsaplin pointed out additional factors affecting the rise in prices. Among them are an increase in the dollar exchange rate, a complication of supply chains due to secondary sanctions, an increase in tax burden and an increase in loan rates.

The Russian Electronic Communications Association (RAEC) predicts that the new requirements will lead to market consolidation and the departure of small players who will not be able to fulfill the established requirements. In 2023, the hosting market in Russia showed an increase of 20% and reached a volume of ₽12,7 billion.^[1]

2023

Foreign hosting providers and domain registrars disable Russian clients

Several foreign companies providing services hosting sent messages to their Russian customers that their services would not be available in Russia. In particular, this was announced by the hosting provider Hetzner^[2]which sent a message to its users that from January 31, 2024, the provider will not be able to provide hosting services. The provider sent the following text to its customers:

{{quote 'We regret to inform you that due to the tense geopolitical situation with Russia, we are terminating our contractual relationship with customers from Russia.

Political decisions have led to changes in legislation that affect our business with Russian clients. Unfortunately, we can no longer conclude contracts with customers with Russian postal addresses. This will affect everyone with a Russian address saved in Hetzner accounts. After we review the customer databases, we will send notice to affected customers to terminate all products and services on Friday, December 15, 2023. It will enter into force on January 31, 2024. We recommend that you take appropriate action now.}}

Message from foreign hosting provider Hetzner

A message of similar content was sent out by one of the major foreign registrars Godaddy^[3], which also provides hosting services. His message to customers reads the following:

{{quote 'Our records indicate that you or a contact on your account may be in the Russian Federation. If our records are correct, your account and/or affected product will be blocked from December 31, 2023. In terms of domain registration, you have until December 31, 2023 to initiate the transfer of any affected domain to the registrar of your choice, subject to inbound transfer restrictions set by other registrars. For instructions on transferring domains, see https://www.godaddy.com/help/transfer-my-domain-away-from-godaddy-3560

For all other products, your access to all data and content held by us will be terminated effective December 31, 2023 and we will not be able to provide you with backups. Accordingly, we respectfully ask you to recover your data and transfer all products you have to the new vendor by this date.}}

Most likely, the Hetzner message refers to the law No. 406-FZ adopted in Russia in the summer of 2023, which, on the one hand, legalizes the activities of hosters, and on the other, from February 1, 2024, introduces a ban on the provision of hosting services by operators who will not register in the register of hosting providers Roskomnadzor. It is clear that it will be difficult for foreign hosting operators to do this. Moreover, the date of December 15, 2023 is indicated in the law as the last date for submitting applications for the inclusion of the operator in the corresponding register.

The Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation will introduce the identification of clients of hosting providers using SBP and bank cards

On October 9, 2023, the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation announced an updated draft resolution on the identification of clients of hosting providers. When preparing the document, the wishes and opinions of the participants of the Russian IT industry and interested departments were taken into account.

The draft resolution is among the by-laws to the amendments to the laws "On Communications" and "On Information" adopted in July 2023. The duty of hosters to establish the identity of customers will appear on December 1, 2023. Initially, it was planned that identification will be carried out through "Public services" and the Unified Biometric System (EBS), using an enhanced qualified electronic signature, as well as through personal submission of documents. Later, Ministry of Digital Development began to consider the possibility of introducing "simplified identification," including for foreign customers.

The Ministry of Digital Development announced an updated draft resolution on the identification of clients of hosting providers

According to the Kommersant newspaper, in accordance with the amendments, hosting providers will also be able to identify customers using a phone number, bank card and Fast Payment System (FPS). In this case, for the duration of the services, the company will be obliged to save information about the date and place of payment, the amount for which the transaction was made, and the payment identifier (unique accrual identifier).

Identification is essential to secure your IT infrastructure. However, market participants say that the new requirements will create an additional burden on companies, including financial ones. In addition, as noted, the proposed amendments do not solve the problem of identifying foreign users. The fact is that when working with the SBP, the client must register in the system and confirm his identity using a special code that is sent to a mobile number. However, foreign users have different phone numbers and foreign accounts.^[4]

Hosting providers ask the Ministry of Digital Development to postpone the placement of infrastructure in the Russian Federation

Large IT companies providing services for virtual hosting of data and sites (hosting providers) asked the Russian Ministry of Digital Development to postpone the entry into force of a departmental order, which tightens their responsibility for the actions of hackers. This became known on October 10, 2023. Read more here.

Published draft rules for identification of hosting clients

The Ministry of Digital Development published a draft government decree "On the approval of the Rules for the identification and (or) authentication of persons who applied to the hosting provider in order to obtain computing power to place information in an information system constantly connected to the Internet information and telecommunication network for public discussion. This was announced on September 27, 2023 by the press service of the State Duma deputy RFAnton Nemkin.

The draft resolution defines the procedure for identifying hosting providers for both individuals and legal entities through four possible methods: through infrastructure Public services and, Unified Biometric System (EBS) confirmation through enhanced qualified (electronic signature UKEP), through transfer from account to or Bank of Russia other countries, EEU as well as through personal appeal.

For those who want to log in personally, a number of documents will be required. For individual entrepreneurs, a passport and an extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities are required, for representatives of legal entities, an extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and a document that confirms their authority to conclude an agreement with the hoster will be required. Individuals will require an identity document.

In addition to identification, the registry of hosting providers will be maintained, as well as the introduction of registry rules and provider requirements for inclusion in the registry. What is important - providers will be obliged to provide the necessary information for conducting operational-search measures. I believe that such actions will have a positive effect on reducing the number of cybercrimes in Russia, "said Anton Nemkin.

Regulation of hosting providers is tightened due to amendments to the federal laws "On Communications" and "On Information," signed by the president on July 31, 2023.

The State Duma approved the creation of a register of hosting providers. Only its participants will be able to provide services

On July 26, 2023, the State Duma approved the creation of a register of hosting providers. Only its participants will be able to provide services. The corresponding amendments to the law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection" and the law "On Communications" were approved in the third (final) reading.

According to RBC, citing the adopted document, hosting providers will now have the right to provide computing power only to those who have passed the identification procedure. Those companies that do not fall into a special register of hosting providers, which Roskomnadzor will be obliged to maintain, will become illegal in Russia and will not be able to legally provide services. If the provider violates any provision of the law, Roskomnadzor will have to send him an appropriate notification, and if the violation is not eliminated within 10 days, it will be excluded from the register.

The State Duma adopted a bill on the regulation of hosting in Russia

We want to make the market transparent, collect information about its participants, determine the conditions for interaction with the authorities, "explained Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, at the end of July 2023. - Now this market is in a rather chaotic state: it is saturated with virtual organizations that do not have their own capacities, and in fact resell hosting services of foreign providers, which in the current geopolitical situation entails serious risks of unpunished dissemination of illegal information, jeopardizes the safety of Russian citizens and companies.

To give the market the opportunity to adapt to new requirements, a transition period will be established for this part of the bill - it is assumed that the registry of hosting providers will begin to operate only from February 1, 2024.^[5]

2022: Russia entered the top 5 countries of Europe in terms of hosting services for online stores

Russia entered the top five countries Europe in terms of the volume of services - hosting Internet stores. This is evidenced by the data released in January 2023 by the German company InterNetX, specializing in hosting services, domain registration and. cyber security

According to the study, by November 2022, the Russian Federation accounted for 6.7% of online store hosting services in Europe. Only Germany (20.7%), the Netherlands (13.2%), Britain (11.5%) and France (9.5%) had higher shares. From the point of view of cities, Berlin (7.2%), London (5.5%), Moscow (4.8%) and Paris (4.5%) are leading in the market.

If we talk about domain names preferred by online stores, then the state of affairs in Europe is strikingly different from the picture in the market of North America or Asia. In these regions, shared top-level domains - led by.COM - account for 86.2% and 67.6% of all domain names used by online retailers. In Europe, 69.6% of online stores operate on domains in national domain zones. The leader, however, here is the.COM domain - 25.8% of all domains of European online stores. 15.5% are in German national domain.DE, 8% are in Dutch national domain.NL. The top five are closed by the national domains of Great Britain. UK and Russia.RU - 7.6% and 4.6%, respectively. As for the new common top-level domains, their share is very modest - about 3%. The leader here is the.SHOP domain, followed by.STORE and.ONLINE.

Among the new geographical top-level domains, the leaders are.berlin (0.7%),.london (0.5%) and.paris (0.5%).

In general, as follows from the report, the number of citizens buying online is still growing. If 2016 online users made purchases in online stores 63% year, then in 2022 this share increased to 75%.^[6]

2021: March 1 - Hosting Provider Day in Russia

In 2021, the holiday was established with the participation of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC) and the KhostReview project. This initiative was supported by all major industry participants.

"This decision did not come spontaneously. The fact is that few people know about hosting as a service and technical platform, only specialists, but our work, although invisible, is indispensable, and during its existence, we have repeatedly proved the quality of Russian and hosting its reliability. And the creation of our own holiday is nothing more than a tribute to those who work day and night to improve information storage and transmission systems, "commented Matvei Alekseev, chairman of the commission of hoster providers at the idea of ​ ​ creating the holiday. RAEC

Notes