Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service implies saving and/or sharing given content on a hosting server handled by a hosting distributor. There are different sorts of hosting services used for various goals, so let's have a glance at these. In that way, you can decide what you want, based on whether you'd like to set up a blog, mails, or to share files with buddies and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service delivered by various web hosts, which lets you share large files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage services are frequently supported by showing adverts beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a given period of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you have a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting corporations, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally inaccurate explanation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would distribute the tasks at hand between independent sets of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various webspace hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, web space hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; certain suppliers provide a hosting solution for images solely. This hosting kind is good if you would like to share an enormous amount of pictures with comrades or partners since the service is commonly free of charge. You will receive a random link for every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be utilized for web sites.

- Email hosting: a service committed to taking care of your email aliases. Some corporations provide web hosting solutions for sites, but do not supply an email hosting solution. If you would like to run an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to keep a site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can create e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP 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 web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video clip brings about a given amount of central processing unit load, so with several video files and several hundred web page viewers, you may have difficulty with your site hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will permit you to use as many video files as you would like without bothering about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you wish to own a site. To a certain degree, it comprises all of the aforesaid hosting kinds since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can create databases and e-mail aliases, upload video files, etc. At WebHost-ing.com, for example, you can take a gaze at web hosting and dedicated server hosting solutions that allow you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one location. There may be restrictions based on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse compared to the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are intended for specific web content only.