Varieties of hosting services

A hosting solution entails stockpiling and/or sharing specific content on a server handled by a web hosting company. There are various sorts of hosting services used for various goals, so let's survey them. In that way, you can pick what you want, depending on whether you'd like to run a web portal, e-mail accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by some hosts, which enables you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only purpose is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file hosting packages are frequently supported by showing adverts next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a given amount of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage plan, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely distorted explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would distribute the workload between autonomous packs of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending miscellaneous webspace hosting services (email, web space, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a variety of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting solution for pictures solely. This hosting variant is suitable if you wish to share a great number of pictures with pals or partners since the service is mostly free. You will receive a randomly generated link for each and 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 web sites.

- Email hosting: a solution dedicated to taking care of your mails. Some distributors provide site hosting services for sites, but do not offer an email solution. If you want to get an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can create email mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a particular video clip, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video produces a specific amount of CPU load, so with several videos and a few hundred web site viewers, you may have a hard time with your hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to run as many videos as you want without hassling about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to keep a web site. To some degree, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting varieties since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and mail accounts, upload videos, and so on. At Advance Softs, for example, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting plans that permit you to have all of the abovementioned services in one location. There may be limits based on the sort of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse compared with the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are planned for specific web content solely.