Groups of hosting solutions

A hosting service means stockpiling and/or sharing particular content on a web server administered by a web hosting distributor. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's survey them. In this way, you can determine what you want, based on whether you'd like to have a web site, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with pals and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service provided by various web hosts, which lets you share immense files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only designation is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting packages are often supported by exhibiting ads beside the download links, while a timer compels you to await a specific interval of time to perceive 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 limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting traders, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly inappropriate interpretation of the literal denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would distribute the load between autonomous stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending various web page hosting services (email, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a brand of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; some distributors offer a hosting solution for pictures solely. This hosting kind is good if you would like to share a great quantity of pics with friends or acquaintances since the solution is typically free. You will obtain a random link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to tackling your e-mail addresses. Some suppliers offer site hosting solutions for web sites, but do not offer an email hosting service. If you want to own an email address with your domain name but do not wish to have a web site, then the email hosting service is what you require. You can open email box accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this approach in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video produces a certain amount of CPU load, so with a handful of video files and several hundred viewers, you may have a problem with your hosting resources. Embedding the video file will allow you to administer as many video clips as you want without worrying about system resources.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you need if you would like to run a web site. To some extent, it comprises all of the abovementioned hosting types since, along with your sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can run databases and e-mail address accounts, upload video files, and so on. At WebHost-ing.com, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web server hosting accounts that enable you to have all of the aforementioned solutions in one place. There may be limitations based on the sort of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the regular e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are made for specific content exclusively.