Question

Explain server technologies and management services associated with hosting and managing websites:

Identify the purpose and types of DNS, including explanations on how domain names are organised and managed.
Explain the purpose and relationships between communication protocols, server hardware, operating systems and web server software with regards to designing, publishing and accessing a website.

Evaluate the impact of common web development technologies and frameworks with regards to website design, functionality and management.

Review the influence of search engines on website performance and provide evidence-based support for improving a site’s index value and rank through search engine optimisation.

Justify the tools and techniques chosen to realise a custom built website.

Answer 1

For hosting and managing websites, we need to have an application server which is to be hosted in the infrastructure. There are several applications servers available in the market which can be open source such as Apache web server. So for hosting a website, you require the code to be deployed on the application server and then the website can be hosted. For managing websites, you can use proxy servers such as Nginx or even load balancer to equally route traffic to the application server.

DNS is the domain Name System, and for every organisation, they have their unique domain name, so what a Dns does is it resolves the hostname to ip address and vice versa. When you hit, www.google.com you don't know the actual IP of the google servers but dns servers have information about the ip address of Google, hence it will resolve the hostname Google and route your traffic to the google server IP.

Communication protocol are used to communicate with the application as communication protocols plays an important role in OSI layer of networking. Through HTTP protocol we are establishing a connection between the user and the application server.

Other than this, operating system, server hardware are also very important while you are hosting your website. The more powerful the server is the more it can able to handle and run heavy weight application smoothly. OS also helps in providing security and other features.

There are several frameworks available in the market and the most popular one is .NET framework and Java framework. These frameworks allow developer to code easily and those code can easily be deployed on to the application server without any hassle. Changes can be also be made on run-time and due their flexibility, businesses are using these frameworks.

Search engine optimisation is very important for an website to have, if you are an e-commerce website then without proper SEO, users won't able to get the products they want. SEO actually make the website more user-friendly and also helps in increasing the rank of the website in Google.

For creating a custom build website or application, tools such as visual studio, where developers can write and develop their codes, git where they can commit the codes they have written.

Using jenkins we can can compile the code by creating builds and then deploying those builds to the application servers.