Groups of hosting services

A hosting solution is associated with saving and/or sharing specific content on a hosting server hosted by a website hosting provider. There are various categories of hosting services utilized for different purposes, so let's have a glance at them. Doing so, you can elect what you need, based on whether you desire to set up a site, mail address accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service delivered by certain vendors, which allows you to share immense files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally generated 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 be unable to view .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans often include ads beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a specific spell of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a completely amiss interpretation of the literal connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would allot the load between separate bunches of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving miscellaneous hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a type of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given distributors provide a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting kind is good if you want to share an enormous number of pics with pals or acquaintances since the service is usually free. You will get a random link for every image 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 utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution dedicated to taking care of your email mailbox accounts. Some distributors provide website hosting solutions for sites, but do not offer an email hosting solution. If you desire to open an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to keep a site, then the email hosting solution is what you want. You can create e-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 email servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a given video, or you can embed the video in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this method instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a given amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred web page viewers, you may have trouble with your site hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will allow you to manage as many video clips as you want without hassling about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you want to run a web site. To a certain extent, it comprises all of the aforesaid hosting brands since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can create databases and emails, upload videos, and so on. At Free Hostia, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting solutions that allow you to have all of the abovementioned services in a single place. There may be restrictions based on the form of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your webspace hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are planned for particular web content solely.