Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service entails stashing and/or sharing certain web content on a hosting server hosted by a web hosting company. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different goals, so let's study them. Thus, you can conclude what you need, based on whether you wish to set up a web portal, mails, or to share files with comrades and partners.

- File hosting: a service provided by particular vendors, which enables you to share immense files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole function is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view an index of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage solutions are often supported by displaying ads by the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific stretch of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you have a paid file hosting package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely wrong interpretation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would allot the tasks at hand between independent groups of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending different web hosting services (email, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a brand of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific corporations provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting variant is appropriate if you wish to share a great amount of pictures with pals or acquaintances since the solution is typically free of cost. You will obtain a random link for each and every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to tackling your email address accounts. Some firms offer web space hosting solutions for sites, but do not supply an e-mail service. If you wish to set up an email address with your domain name but do not wish to have a website, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can open e-mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a given video, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video produces a certain amount of CPU load, so with a handful of video files and a few hundred viewers, you may have difficulty with your webspace hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will allow you to administer as many video clips as you desire without bothering about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to own a site. To some extent, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting variants since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and e-mail address accounts, upload videos, etc. At WebHost-ing.com, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated server hosting packages that enable you to have all of the aforesaid services in one location. There may be limits based on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the typical email/file/video/image hosting plans that are designed for particular web content solely.