Categories of hosting services

A hosting solution refers to hoarding and/or sharing particular content on a web hosting server administered by a web hosting provider. There are various kinds of hosting services utilized for different goals, so let's take a peek at them. Thus, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you wish to run a web portal, e-mails, or to share files with comrades and partners.

- File hosting: a solution provided by given vendors, which allows you to share immense files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to see an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free file storage accounts frequently involve ads by the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a given period of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting plan, there are no limitations 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.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting merchants, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely fallacious interpretation of the literal denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would divide the tasks at hand between different sets of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous web hosting services (mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a type of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; specific distributors provide a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting type is good if you desire to share an enormous number of pics with buddies or acquaintances since the service is generally free of charge. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to taking care of your mail accounts. Some suppliers provide webspace hosting services for websites, but do not provide an e-mail service. If you desire to set up an email address with your domain name but do not wish to possess a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you want. You can create e-mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a specific video, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video creates a given amount of CPU load, so with a few video files and several hundred site viewers, you may have trouble with your web page hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to operate as many videos as you want to without bothering about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you desire to possess a site. To a certain extent, it involves all of the aforesaid hosting groups since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and e-mail box accounts, upload video clips, etc. At W3 For All, for instance, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting services that permit you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one single place. There may be limitations depending on the sort of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web hosting package may be better or worse compared to the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for particular content only.