Forms of hosting services

A hosting solution appertains to keeping and/or sharing certain content on a web server run by a hosting company. There are different forms of hosting services used for various goals, so let's study them. Doing so, you can determine what you want, based on whether you desire to run a web portal, e-mails, or to share files with chums and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service delivered by given hosts, which lets you share immense files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage solutions are often supported by showing ads by the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific interval of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly inapt interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would divide the load between independent hosts of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various webspace hosting services (mail, disk storage, statistics, DNS, databases, website hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is just a sort of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific corporations provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting kind is good if you would like to share a big number of pictures with pals or associates since the solution is typically free of cost. You will receive a random link for each and every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for websites.

- Email hosting: a service devoted to handling your e-mail accounts. Some corporations provide website hosting services for web sites, but do not provide an e-mail service. If you want to create an email address with your domain name but do not desire to run a web site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can create email mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file generates a certain amount of CPU load, so with a handful of video clips and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have difficulty with your web hosting quotas. Embedding the video will enable you to manage as many videos as you wish without hassling about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to keep a website. To a certain degree, it contains all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and e-mail addresses, upload videos, and so on. At WebHost-ing.com, for example, you can have a peek at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting accounts that enable you to have all of the aforementioned services in a single location. There may be restrictions depending on the type of hosting solution that you've picked - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting package may be better or worse compared to the routine email/file/video/image hosting packages that are purposed for specific content exclusively.