Varieties of hosting solutions

A hosting service suggests stashing and/or sharing certain web content on a server hosted by a website hosting company. There are various kinds of hosting services utilized for various ends, so let's take a look at these. In this way, you can elect what you want, depending on whether you wish to have a site, e-mail aliases, or to share files with mates and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service offered by particular web hosts, which enables you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single designation is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file hosting services are often supported by showing advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a certain period of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, 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 distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely erroneous explanation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allocate the load between different sets of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving various web hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, web hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is only a type of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some firms offer a hosting solution for images only. This hosting variant is good if you wish to share an immense number of images with chums or associates since the solution is generally free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for each pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web pages.

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

- Video hosting: this service enables 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 page that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing 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 a handful of video files and several hundred web page viewers, you may have a hard time with your web space hosting resources. Embedding the video file will permit you to keep as many video files as you want to without hassling about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to keep a site. To some extent, it contains all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your websites, you can also host pictures and files, you can create databases and mail addresses, upload video files, etc. At Exclusive Hosting, for example, you can explore web hosting and dedicated web hosting plans that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one single location. There may be limitations based on the form of hosting solution that you've chosen - 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 regular e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are tailored for particular content exclusively.