Kinds of hosting services

A hosting service applies to keeping and/or sharing particular content on a web server managed by a web hosting distributor. There are various kinds of hosting services used for different aims, so let's examine these. Doing so, you can determine what you need, on the basis of whether you wish to have a web page, email address accounts, or to share files with mates and associates.

- File hosting: a service furnished by some file storage providers, which permits you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole goal is to share files, since it does not offer website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage accounts frequently include advertisements next to the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a given amount of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download right away, 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 wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely erroneous explanation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would split the load between autonomous stacks of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending miscellaneous web space hosting services (electronic mail, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, hosting CP, etc.) 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: similar to file hosting; some vendors provide a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share a great amount of images with friends or partners since the solution is generally free. You will get a random link for each image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to administering your e-mails. Some vendors provide site hosting solutions for websites, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you wish to run a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to own a website, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open e-mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a particular video clip, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this method in lieu of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip produces a specific amount of CPU load, so with a few videos and several hundred web site visitors, you may have a problem with your web site hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will allow you to use as many video files as you want without worrying about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to have a website. To some extent, it contains all of the abovementioned hosting brands since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and mails, upload video files, and so on. At CabbageTree Solutions, for instance, you can have a peek at web hosting and dedicated hosting services that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in a single location. There may be limits based on the sort of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the usual e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are designed for specific content exclusively.