Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service entails saving and/or sharing particular content on a hosting server administered by a hosting vendor. There are various kinds of hosting services used for various goals, so let's study them. Thus, you can determine what you want, based on whether you desire to set up a site, email mailbox accounts, or to share files with friends and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service distributed by various vendors, which enables you to share huge files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only aim is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to open .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting solutions are often supported by exhibiting ads by the download links, while a timer makes you await a given interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you possess a paid file storage package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the help of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a completely erroneous explanation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would share the tasks at hand between separate hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending different web hosting services (email, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a sort of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; given companies provide a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting brand is suitable if you would like to share a great quantity of pictures with mates or associates since the service is typically free. You will get a randomly generated link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a service dedicated to handling your electronic mail accounts. Some providers provide site hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you desire to run an email address with your domain name but do not want to have a site, then the email hosting service is what you require. You can create e-mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting service 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 a specific video file, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this approach in lieu of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video creates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of videos and a few hundred web site visitors, you may have difficulty with your webspace hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will permit you to administer as many video files as you would like without hassling about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you want to run a website. To some degree, it comprises all of the abovementioned hosting sorts since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can run databases and mail aliases, upload video files, etc. At WebHost-ing.com, for instance, you can take a peek at web hosting and dedicated hosting accounts that allow you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one single place. There may be limitations based on the sort of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web page hosting account may be better or worse compared with the regular email/file/video/image hosting plans that are conceived for particular web content exclusively.