Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service entails storing and/or sharing particular content on a web server administered by a web hosting vendor. There are different categories of hosting services used for various aims, so let's have a glimpse at them. Thus, you can elect what you need, depending on whether you desire to establish a blog, mail accounts, or to share files with chums and partners.

- File hosting: a solution made available by various vendors, which lets you share big files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single designation is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-charge file storage plans are often supported by showing advertisements next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a certain interval of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is an entirely imprecise interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would share the load between different stacks of servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending miscellaneous website hosting services (mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is just a kind of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; certain vendors provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting brand is good if you wish to share a large number of pictures with chums or partners since the service is typically free of cost. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each and every picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to tackling your email aliases. Some companies offer hosting solutions for sites, but do not offer an e-mail solution. If you wish to keep a mail address with your domain name but do not want to own a web site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can open email address accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this method in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video clip brings about a certain amount of CPU load, so with a few video clips and several hundred site viewers, you may have a hard time with your site hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will enable you to manage as many videos as you desire without bothering about system quotas.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to own a site. To a certain degree, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting variants since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and e-mail address accounts, upload videos, and so on. At YourSiteService.com, for example, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting accounts that enable you to get all of the abovementioned solutions in one place. There may be limitations depending on the sort of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web page hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are created for specific content only.