Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service appertains to saving and/or sharing certain content on a server run by a website hosting company. There are different sorts of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's take a glimpse at them. Doing so, you can determine what you need, on the basis of whether you wish to create a web site, email box accounts, or to share files with friends and associates.

- File hosting: a service delivered by certain firms, which permits you to share big files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only function is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans are frequently supported by exhibiting adverts beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a specific stretch of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you get a paid file storage package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchants, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly improper explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allot the workload between individual stacks of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending miscellaneous web page hosting services (mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is just a sort of a disk space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some providers provide a hosting service for pictures solely. This hosting kind is good if you wish to share a large number of pics with mates or associates since the service is generally free of cost. You will get a random link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to handling your electronic mail accounts. Some distributors provide web hosting solutions for web pages, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you want to run an email address with your domain name but do not desire to keep a website, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can create email accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this approach instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video files and several hundred web page visitors, you may have a problem with your hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will enable you to have as many video clips as you would like without worrying about system resources.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to possess a site. To some degree, it incorporates all of the aforesaid hosting forms since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and mails, upload video files, and so on. At CSSHostingLab, for example, you can view web hosting and dedicated hosting packages that allow you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one single place. There may be restrictions based on the kind of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting account may be better or worse compared to the standard email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are created for particular content exclusively.