Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution applies to stashing and/or sharing specific web content on a hosting server handled by a website hosting vendor. There are different categories of hosting services used for various aims, so let's take a glance at these. Thus, you can decide what you want, depending on whether you desire to create a website, mail aliases, or to share files with pals and partners.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by various firms, which allows you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting solutions often involve ads beside the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a specific spell of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you purchase a paid file storage plan, there are no restrictions 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.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a totally imprecise interpretation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would share the load between independent stacks of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending miscellaneous site hosting services (electronic mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a variety of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given distributors provide a hosting service for images solely. This hosting type is appropriate if you desire to share a vast quantity of images with mates or colleagues since the service is commonly free of charge. You will obtain a random link for every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be utilized for web sites.

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

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a specific video, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video clip creates a given amount of central processing unit load, so with a bunch of video files and several hundred site viewers, you may have a problem with your web site hosting resources. Embedding the video file will enable you to keep as many videos as you desire without bothering about system supplies.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to run a website. To some extent, it encompasses all of the aforesaid hosting categories since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and email mailbox accounts, upload videos, and so on. At AfterHost, for instance, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that permit you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in a single location. There may be limits based on the form of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your webspace hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the conventional email/file/video/image hosting plans that are meant for particular web content solely.