Varieties of hosting services

A hosting solution concerns stashing and/or sharing specific web content on a hosting server hosted by a web hosting vendor. There are different classes of hosting services utilized for various purposes, so let's examine these. In that way, you can determine what you want, based on whether you desire to build a web site, mail aliases, or to share files with chums and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution furnished by some web hosts, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single objective is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage plans are often supported by exhibiting ads next to the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a specific spell of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file hosting package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly wrong interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would assign the tasks at hand between autonomous groups of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various web site hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a brand of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some providers provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting variant is good if you want to share an enormous amount of images with mates or acquaintances since the solution is generally free of cost. You will get a randomly generated link for every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution dedicated to managing your e-mail address accounts. Some providers offer site hosting services for websites, but do not offer an email hosting service. If you wish to run a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to own a website, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can create e-mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video file in your web site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a particular amount of CPU load, so with a few video files and several hundred site viewers, you may have a problem with your site hosting resources. Embedding the video file will allow you to operate as many videos as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to keep a site. To some extent, it incorporates all of the aforesaid hosting groups since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and email mailbox accounts, upload videos, and so on. At marcos, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web hosting solutions that permit you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one place. There may be limits depending on the type of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse compared to the conventional email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are purposed for specific content exclusively.