Categories of hosting services

A hosting service entails depositing and/or sharing given web content on a web server managed by a web hosting provider. There are various sorts of hosting services utilized for various purposes, so let's examine these. Doing so, you can decide what you want, on the basis of whether you'd like to build a web portal, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with mates and partners.

- File hosting: a service made available by given firms, which lets you share enormous files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single designation is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a record of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting services are frequently supported by displaying adverts by the download links, while a timer makes you await a given period of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you have a paid file storage account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation with regard to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly imprecise interpretation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would assign the load between autonomous hosts of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different website hosting services (email, disk storage, statistics, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is just a type of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some providers provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting kind is suitable if you desire to share an immense amount of pics with mates or colleagues since the solution is generally free of cost. You will obtain a random link for every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to tackling your email box accounts. Some distributors offer hosting solutions for sites, but do not provide an e-mail service. If you want to manage an email address with your domain name but do not want to have a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you need. You can open email accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables 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 availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video creates a certain amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video files and a few hundred web site visitors, you may have a problem with your web page hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will enable you to possess as many video clips as you wish without bothering about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to run a site. To a certain degree, it includes all of the aforementioned hosting varieties since, along with your web sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and e-mailbox accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Free Hostia, for instance, you can see web hosting and dedicated web server hosting solutions that allow you to get all of the abovementioned solutions in one single location. There may be restrictions based on the kind of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting account may be better or worse compared to the regular e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are intended for specific content exclusively.