Types of hosting solutions

A hosting service pertains to saving and/or sharing specific content on a web hosting server managed by a website hosting supplier. There are different groups of hosting services utilized for various purposes, so let's have a peek at these. In that way, you can elect what you want, depending on whether you wish to establish a web page, e-mail accounts, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service made available by particular companies, which permits you to share immense files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole aim is to share files, since it does not support website 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 an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting solutions are frequently supported by exhibiting advertisements next to the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a specific period of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you possess a paid file storage plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limit with regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a totally fallacious interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would split the tasks at hand between independent bunches of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous site hosting services (mail, disk storage, statistics, DNS, databases, Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a sort of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific providers offer a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting type is appropriate if you wish to share a big number of images with mates or associates since the solution is commonly free. You will receive a random link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to administering your e-mail aliases. Some providers provide web page hosting solutions for sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you wish to own an email address with your domain name but do not wish to keep a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can set up electronic mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video file, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with several videos and several hundred site viewers, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will permit you to manage as many video files as you desire without hassling about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you wish to run a site. To a certain degree, it comprises all of the aforesaid hosting varieties since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can create databases and e-mail box accounts, upload video files, etc. At Small Business Network Administrators, for example, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated server hosting packages that enable you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one single location. There may be limitations based on the form of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are planned for particular web content only.