Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution concerns storing and/or sharing certain web content on a server handled by a web hosting distributor. There are different varieties of hosting services utilized for various ends, so let's take a glance at these. In this way, you can elect what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to own a site, e-mail address accounts, or to share files with comrades and partners.

- File hosting: a service supplied by various web hosts, which allows you to share huge files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole goal is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view an index of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage plans are often supported by exhibiting ads next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a certain amount of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you own a paid file hosting plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limit when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchants, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a completely erroneous interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would assign the workload between separate hosts of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving various website hosting services (email, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, webspace hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a kind of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given corporations provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting type is appropriate if you would like to share an immense amount of pictures with friends or acquaintances since the solution is usually free of cost. You will get a random link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to administering your e-mail addresses. Some vendors provide web site hosting solutions for websites, but do not offer an email hosting service. If you want to get a mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can open e-mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a particular amount of CPU load, so with a few videos and several hundred site viewers, you may have a problem with your website hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will enable you to operate as many videos as you wish without bothering about system reserves.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you desire to keep a web site. To some degree, it comprises all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can keep databases and email box accounts, upload videos, and so on. At Free Hostia, for example, you can have a gaze at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that permit you to have all of the aforesaid services in one single location. There may be restrictions depending on the type of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the conventional email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are created for particular web content only.