Sorts of hosting services
A hosting solution entails stockpiling and/or sharing certain content on a server managed by a web hosting provider. There are various sorts of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's review these. Thus, you can elect what you need, depending on whether you wish to set up a website, email addresses, or to share files with mates and acquaintances.
- File hosting: a solution made available by various hosts, which lets you share huge files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single designation is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage services are often supported by showing advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a particular interval of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.
Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally wrong interpretation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would allocate the load between independent hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various web site hosting services (email, disk storage, statistics, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a type of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.
- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; given providers provide a hosting service for pictures solely. This hosting type is suitable if you wish to share a huge number of pics with chums or colleagues since the solution is generally free of charge. You will receive a random link for each and every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for web sites.
- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to managing your e-mail aliases. Some distributors provide web space hosting services for web sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you would like to launch a mail address with your domain name but do not want to own a web site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can open email box accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.
- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a specific amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and a few hundred web site visitors, you may have a hard time with your site hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will allow you to manage as many videos as you wish without bothering about system reserves.
- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to possess a web site. To a certain extent, it involves all of the aforesaid hosting varieties since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can keep databases and email aliases, upload video files, and so on. At WebHost-ing.com, for example, you can take a gaze at web hosting and dedicated hosting accounts that permit you to get all of the abovementioned services in a single location. There may be limits based on the type of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your webspace hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are designed for particular web content exclusively.