Groups of hosting solutions

A hosting service pertains to stockpiling and/or sharing given web content on a hosting server hosted by a website hosting vendor. There are different groups of hosting services utilized for different purposes, so let's take a glimpse at these. Thus, you can decide what you want, depending on whether you wish to launch a website, e-mail aliases, or to share files with buddies and partners.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by some companies, which enables you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single purpose is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly 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 open .html or .php web files in your browser. Free file storage packages are often supported by showing adverts next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a particular span of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file storage account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely distorted explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would assign the workload between independent bunches of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending different web site hosting services (mail, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some vendors provide a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting kind is good if you would like to share a big amount of images with mates or colleagues since the solution is generally free. You will get a random 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 used for web sites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to taking care of your e-mailbox accounts. Some providers provide web site hosting solutions for sites, but do not offer an email solution. If you want to run a mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can create mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this approach in lieu of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file produces a certain amount of CPU load, so with several video clips and a few hundred website viewers, you may have a problem with your web site hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will allow you to possess as many videos as you wish without hassling about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you need if you desire to run a website. To some degree, it comprises all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your web sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can have databases and e-mail aliases, upload video files, and so on. At Hosting Pro, for example, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated hosting solutions that allow you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one location. There may be limits based on the sort of hosting service that you've picked - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the routine e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are conceived for particular web content solely.