Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service pertains to saving and/or sharing given content on a web hosting server managed by a website hosting provider. There are different types of hosting services utilized for various goals, so let's have a peek at these. Doing so, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to build a web site, mail accounts, or to share files with mates and partners.

- File hosting: a solution furnished by certain file storage providers, which lets you share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single purpose is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file storage accounts are often supported by exhibiting ads by the download links, while a timer makes you await a particular span of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file storage account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely fallacious interpretation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would distribute the workload between independent packs of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending miscellaneous web space hosting services (email, web space, stats, DNS, databases, web hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a sort of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; given vendors offer a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting kind is appropriate if you want to share a large amount of pics with pals or acquaintances since the service is usually free. You will receive a randomly generated link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to handling your mailbox accounts. Some vendors provide web space hosting solutions for web pages, but do not provide an e-mail solution. If you would like to own an email address with your domain name but do not desire to keep a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can create email accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video generates a given amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred website visitors, you may have a problem with your web hosting quotas. Embedding the video will enable you to operate as many video clips as you wish without bothering about system supplies.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to have a web site. To a certain extent, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and e-mail accounts, upload video files, and so on. At YourSiteService.com, for instance, you can observe web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that enable you to get all of the abovementioned services in one place. There may be limitations based on the type of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the regular email/file/video/image hosting packages that are planned for specific content solely.