Classes of Hosting Solutions
A hosting service appertains to keeping and/or sharing given content on a web server managed by a web hosting supplier. There are various categories of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's have a gaze at them. In this way, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to launch a web site, e-mailbox accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.
- File hosting: a solution delivered by particular vendors, which enables you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole function is to share files, since it does not offer 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 examine a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free file hosting plans frequently involve ads by the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a given interval of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.
At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely wrong explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud web hosting environment would allocate the tasks at hand between separate groups of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different website hosting services (mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is merely a type of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.
- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given suppliers provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting type is suitable if you wish to share a vast amount of images with buddies or partners since the service is usually free of charge. You will get a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for websites.
- Email hosting: a solution devoted to taking care of your e-mail box accounts. Some suppliers offer website hosting services for web sites, but do not supply an email solution. If you would like to launch a mail address with your domain but do not desire to keep a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can create email address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domain. The e-mail hosting service includes 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 a particular video, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with several video clips and a few hundred web site viewers, you may have a problem with your webspace hosting quotas. Embedding the video will enable you to use as many video files as you would like without hassling about system quotas.
- Website hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to keep a web site. To a certain extent, it involves all of the aforementioned hosting kinds since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can have databases and email accounts, upload video files, etc. At '50webs.com', for example, you can take a glance at shared and dedicated hosting accounts that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one location. There may be limitations based on the sort of hosting service that you've chosen - a free web hosting package, a paid cheap web hosting package, a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are meant for particular web content only.