Forms of hosting solutions

A hosting solution entails keeping and/or sharing specific content on a server managed by a hosting vendor. There are various groups of hosting services utilized for various goals, so let's take a glimpse at them. In that way, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you desire to run a web portal, mail addresses, or to share files with buddies and partners.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by certain file storage providers, which permits you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. The moment 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 record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free file hosting accounts are often supported by showing ads next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a given amount of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you have a paid file storage plan, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Nowadays, with the help of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely inapt explanation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would share the tasks at hand between individual hosts of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving various web site hosting services (mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is only a variety of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some suppliers offer a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you want to share a huge amount of pictures with comrades or colleagues since the service is generally free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to taking care of your e-mail accounts. Some distributors offer webspace hosting solutions for web sites, but do not offer an email hosting solution. If you wish to keep an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to keep a website, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing this approach instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video file creates a given amount of CPU load, so with a handful of videos and several hundred site viewers, you may have trouble with your website hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will allow you to run as many videos as you wish without worrying about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to have a web site. To a certain extent, it embodies all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can create databases and mailbox accounts, upload video files, etc. At YourSiteService.com, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated server hosting plans that permit you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single place. There may be limits based on the kind of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your site hosting package may be better or worse in comparison with the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are made for specific content solely.