Varieties of hosting solutions

A hosting service pertains to storing and/or sharing specific content on a server handled by a website hosting provider. There are various kinds of hosting services utilized for various ends, so let's have a glance at these. Thus, you can conclude what you want, on the basis of whether you'd like to have a web site, e-mail addresses, or to share files with friends and associates.

- File hosting: a service provided by some vendors, which permits you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting packages are frequently supported by showing advertisements next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a particular interval of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the help of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is an entirely improper interpretation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would share the workload between autonomous hosts of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending miscellaneous webspace hosting services (electronic mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, web hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a type of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; certain vendors provide a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting brand is appropriate if you wish to share a vast amount of pics with chums or colleagues since the solution is generally free. You will get a randomly generated link for each picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for websites.

- Email hosting: a service committed to managing your e-mail box accounts. Some firms provide site hosting solutions for sites, but do not provide an e-mail service. If you want to get an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to keep a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can set up email mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a particular video file, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video clip generates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a few video clips and a few hundred site viewers, you may have difficulty with your website hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will enable you to operate as many video files as you want to without worrying about system reserves.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you desire to possess a website. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can keep databases and e-mail box accounts, upload video clips, etc. At I'mHosting, for example, you can take a gaze at web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts that permit you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one place. There may be limits depending on the form of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse in comparison with the typical e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are designed for specific web content exclusively.