Types of hosting services

A hosting solution is related to keeping and/or sharing specific web content on a server hosted by a web hosting provider. There are various types of hosting services utilized for various ends, so let's review these. Doing so, you can conclude what you need, depending on whether you wish to set up a web site, mail aliases, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by certain firms, which allows you to share huge files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only function is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file storage solutions are frequently supported by exhibiting advertisements next to the download links, while a timer compels you to await a particular period of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file storage account, there are no limits 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.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely incongruous interpretation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would allot the load between individual stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending various web site hosting services (email, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is only a variety of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting kind is appropriate if you desire to share an enormous number of images with buddies or acquaintances since the service is commonly 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 utilized for web sites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to managing your e-mail aliases. Some corporations offer website hosting solutions for websites, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you wish to launch an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to run a web site, then the email hosting service is what you require. You can create email box accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a particular video, or you can embed the video file in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video clip generates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of videos and a few hundred visitors, you may have difficulty with your web page hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will allow you to keep as many videos as you wish without bothering about system quotas.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to possess a site. To a certain extent, it embodies all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can keep databases and mail aliases, upload videos, etc. At Free Hostia, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that enable you to have all of the aforesaid services in one place. There may be restrictions based on the form of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the standard email/file/video/image hosting plans that are meant for specific web content exclusively.