What are ArcGIS Online hosted services?
You can publish your maps and data as web services on ArcGIS Online. When you do this, ArcGIS Online takes care of hosting your services and scaling to meet demand, hence these are often called "hosted services". Web, desktop, and mobile applications can access your ArcGIS Online hosted services from anywhere on the Internet if you choose to allow it. You can publish these services directly from your desktop without installing your own server.
Why would I publish services to ArcGIS Online?
ArcGIS Online hosted services are useful when you need to expose a map or dataset on the web, but you do not have your own GIS server. It's also an easy way to share certain maps with an Internet audience if your own GIS server cannot be made public.
What are the prerequisites for publishing services to ArcGIS Online?
In order to publish services to ArcGIS Online, you must have the following:
- An account that is part of an ArcGIS Online organization
- Membership in a Publisher or Administrator role for your account
- ArcMap 10.1
What types of services can I publish to ArcGIS Online?
ArcGIS Online hosted services are designed for map visualization, editing, and query. You can publish the following types of services:
Feature services—These support vector feature querying, visualization, and editing. Feature services are most appropriate for overlay services that go on top of your base maps. In web apps, feature services are drawn by the browser and support interactive highlighting, queries, and popups.
See Hosted feature services to learn more about this type of service.
Tiled map services—These support fast map visualization using a collection of predrawn map images, or tiles. These tiles are created and stored on the server after you upload your data. Tiled map services are appropriate for base maps that give your web maps geographic context.
See Hosted tiled map services to learn more about this type of service.
You can publish both types of services directly from ArcMap. You can expose the same map in both ways if you choose. You can alternatively publish feature services from a shapefile or CSV file.
What types of clients can use ArcGIS Online hosted services?
ArcGIS Online hosted services communicate through the well-known GeoServices REST Specification and can consequently be used by Esri and non-Esri applications. An easy way to view your services is through the ArcGIS.com map viewer, but you can also make your own application using the ArcGIS viewers for Flex or Silverlight, or the ArcGIS APIs for JavaScript, Flex, Silverlight, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Other supported client applications include ArcGIS Explorer (online and desktop versions) and ArcMap.
Who can see my ArcGIS Online hosted services?
By default, a published service is private and is only accessible to the publisher. It does not appear in search results and isn't part of any group. You can choose to make your services available to specific groups on ArcGIS Online, or you can even open them to the general public. See Securing hosted services to learn more.