Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service entails storing and/or sharing certain content on a web server administered by a website hosting distributor. There are various classes of hosting services used for various ends, so let's have a peek at them. Thus, you can elect what you need, based on whether you wish to create a web page, mail address accounts, or to share files with buddies and partners.

- File hosting: a solution provided by certain hosts, which enables you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only purpose is to share files, since it does not offer website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting services are often supported by showing advertisements by the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a certain stretch of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file storage package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limitation with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely imprecise interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would share the tasks at hand between autonomous groups of web servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending miscellaneous website hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, web hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is merely a brand of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; specific firms offer a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting brand is suitable if you wish to share a vast number of pics with pals or colleagues since the solution is usually free. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to managing your email addresses. Some firms offer webspace hosting services for websites, but do not offer an e-mail solution. If you would like to keep an email address with your domain name but do not desire to keep a site, then the email hosting service is what you want. You can set up mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video file in your web site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video brings about a given amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and a few hundred viewers, you may have a problem with your web space hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will allow you to keep as many video files as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you need if you desire to have a web site. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforesaid hosting kinds since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can create databases and mail accounts, upload videos, etc. At Free Hostia, for instance, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that allow you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single place. There may be limitations based on the form of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web page hosting package may be better or worse compared with the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are intended for particular web content exclusively.