Categories of hosting services

A hosting service is related to saving and/or sharing given web content on a hosting server managed by a website hosting company. There are different classes of hosting services utilized for various aims, so let's have a look at them. In this way, you can conclude what you want, based on whether you wish to create a website, e-mail address accounts, or to share files with friends and partners.

- File hosting: a service provided by given companies, which lets you share huge files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file hosting packages often involve ads beside the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a specific period of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run 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.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely false explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would share the workload between autonomous packs of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a type of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some corporations offer a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share an enormous number of pics with chums or colleagues since the solution is commonly free. You will get a random link for each image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to administering your e-mail aliases. Some corporations offer hosting services for web pages, but do not supply an email hosting solution. If you would like to possess a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a website, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can create e-mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video generates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and several hundred web site visitors, you may have difficulty with your web page hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will enable you to possess as many video clips as you wish without worrying about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you desire to have a site. To a certain degree, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your websites, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and email addresses, upload video clips, and so on. At Hostomedia, for instance, you can view web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that permit you to get all of the aforesaid services in one place. There may be limitations based on the type of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web hosting package may be better or worse compared with the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are meant for specific web content exclusively.