Categories of hosting services

A hosting solution concerns storing and/or sharing certain web content on a server hosted by a web hosting vendor. There are various sorts of hosting services utilized for different purposes, so let's take a glance at these. In this way, you can conclude what you need, depending on whether you wish to own a blog, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with comrades and partners.

- File hosting: a solution furnished by various file storage providers, which permits you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole aim is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a record 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 hosting solutions are frequently supported by exhibiting advertisements beside the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a specific amount of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you possess a paid file hosting account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly wrong interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would apportion the tasks at hand between individual packs of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different hosting services (mail, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is just a brand of a disk space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some firms offer a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting variant is good if you desire to share a huge quantity of pictures with friends or colleagues since the solution is commonly free of cost. You will get a randomly generated link for every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution dedicated to managing your electronic mail accounts. Some corporations offer web space hosting services for websites, but do not offer an email solution. If you want to manage an e-mail address with your domain name but do not desire to run a site, then the email hosting service is what you require. You can create email box accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video file in your site 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 file produces a given amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have a problem with your web page hosting resources. Embedding the video will enable you to own as many video files as you want to without bothering about system reserves.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you want to run a site. To a certain extent, it consists of all of the aforesaid hosting types since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and e-mail box accounts, upload videos, and so on. At Affordable and Reliable Hosting, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that enable you to get all of the abovementioned services in one location. There may be restrictions based on the type of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are meant for particular web content solely.