Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution entails depositing and/or sharing certain content on a server managed by a web hosting supplier. There are various classes of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's have a peek at them. Doing so, you can elect what you need, on the basis of whether you desire to establish a web page, email mailbox accounts, or to share files with pals and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution made available by certain firms, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. As soon as 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 roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting solutions are frequently supported by showing advertisements by the download links, while a timer forces you to await a given period of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a totally incongruous interpretation of the literal connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would allocate the load between different groups of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different web hosting services (email, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a kind of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some suppliers provide a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting kind is good if you desire to share a big number of pics with comrades or acquaintances since the solution is mostly free of cost. You will receive a random link for each pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution dedicated to taking care of your e-mail aliases. Some distributors provide web space hosting services for sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting solution. If you wish to launch an email address with your domain name but do not wish to own a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open email accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video generates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred viewers, you may have a problem with your web page hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will permit you to have as many video clips as you would like without hassling about system resources.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to have a site. To a certain extent, it includes all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can have databases and email mailbox accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At Sitewarehouse, for example, you can have a gaze at web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that enable you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one single location. There may be restrictions based on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the standard email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are conceived for particular content exclusively.