Classes of hosting services

A hosting solution includes saving and/or sharing given web content on a web hosting server run by a web hosting company. There are various sorts of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's survey them. In this way, you can conclude what you want, depending on whether you wish to run a blog, e-mail accounts, or to share files with comrades and associates.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by some companies, which permits you to share huge files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only purpose is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting solutions are often supported by showing ads by the download links, while a timer makes you await a given span of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you own a paid file hosting 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 suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally unsuitable interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would divide the workload between autonomous stacks of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving various web page hosting services (email, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, webspace hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is just a variety of a disk space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific providers provide a hosting service for images only. This hosting brand is suitable if you want to share an enormous quantity of images with comrades or acquaintances since the service is typically free of charge. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to handling your e-mail aliases. Some distributors provide web page hosting services for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail hosting solution. If you want to set up a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to keep a website, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can open mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video generates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with several video files and a few hundred visitors, you may have difficulty with your hosting supplies. Embedding the video will allow you to manage as many videos as you desire without bothering about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you want to possess a website. To some extent, it incorporates all of the abovementioned hosting brands since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can create databases and electronic mail accounts, upload video clips, etc. At Free Hostia, for instance, you can have a peek at web hosting and dedicated web hosting plans that permit you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one place. There may be limitations depending on the kind of hosting solution that you've picked - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the common email/file/video/image hosting packages that are meant for specific web content exclusively.