Kinds of hosting solutions

A hosting service is associated with keeping and/or sharing certain content on a server administered by a web hosting distributor. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different aims, so let's study these. In that way, you can conclude what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to launch a weblog, electronic mail accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by various web hosts, which permits you to share large files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole goal is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free file storage accounts frequently involve adverts beside the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a certain interval of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file storage plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a completely inappropriate explanation of the literal connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would share the tasks at hand between separate groups of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous web page hosting services (email, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, webspace hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a variety of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific distributors provide a hosting solution for images solely. This hosting variant is good if you want to share an immense quantity of pictures with friends or partners since the service is generally free of cost. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a service dedicated to managing your mails. Some companies provide website hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you would like to get a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you require. You can set up e-mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file produces a given amount of CPU load, so with a few video clips and a few hundred viewers, you may have a hard time with your web site hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will allow you to use as many video files as you want without bothering about system quotas.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you require if you want to own a site. To a certain degree, it encompasses all of the aforesaid hosting forms since, along with your sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can have databases and e-mail box accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Exclusive Hosting, for example, you can have a peek at web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages that allow you to get all of the abovementioned solutions in one location. There may be limits depending on the type of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web space hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting plans that are conceived for particular web content exclusively.