Forms of hosting services

A hosting solution entails stockpiling and/or sharing specific content on a web hosting server administered by a website hosting vendor. There are different categories of hosting services utilized for various ends, so let's take a peek at them. Thus, you can decide what you need, depending on whether you'd like to have a web portal, email address accounts, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service furnished by given vendors, which allows you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support website 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 be unable to view .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free file hosting accounts are often supported by exhibiting adverts beside the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a certain amount of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly erroneous explanation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would divide the tasks at hand between different sets of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different web site hosting services (electronic mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is simply a variety of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; some firms provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting variant is appropriate if you desire to share a great quantity of pics with mates or partners since the solution is typically free. You will receive a randomly generated link for each picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for web pages.

- Email hosting: a service committed to administering your e-mail aliases. Some suppliers provide website hosting services for web sites, but do not provide an email service. If you desire to possess an email address with your domain name but do not wish to run a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can open email mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file produces a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a couple of video clips and several hundred site visitors, you may have trouble with your web space hosting quotas. Embedding the video will allow you to own as many videos as you would like without bothering about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you would like to possess a website. To some degree, it contains all of the abovementioned hosting groups since, along with your websites, you can also host pictures and files, you can run databases and email addresses, upload video files, etc. At Cool Enterprises Limited, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting plans that allow you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one location. There may be limits depending on the form of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your webspace hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the common email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for particular web content only.