Varieties of hosting services

A hosting service implies stockpiling and/or sharing particular web content on a hosting server handled by a website hosting provider. There are different types of hosting services utilized for different goals, so let's explore these. In this way, you can elect what you want, based on whether you wish to establish a site, e-mail aliases, or to share files with pals and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service distributed by some hosts, which lets you share huge files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting packages frequently include advertisements by the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a given span of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit with regard to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a completely amiss interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would distribute the tasks at hand between separate groups of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different web space hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, webspace hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a type of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; specific vendors provide a hosting service for images solely. This hosting type is appropriate if you want to share a great amount of pics with mates or partners since the solution is commonly free. You will get a randomly generated 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 supported, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to managing your mail aliases. Some distributors provide web space hosting services for websites, but do not supply an e-mail service. If you wish to create an email address with your domain name but do not desire to own a website, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can set up e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video produces a given amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video clips and several hundred web page visitors, you may have a hard time with your web site hosting quotas. Embedding the video will permit you to administer as many video clips as you want without hassling about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to run a web site. To some extent, it contains all of the aforesaid hosting types since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can create databases and mail address accounts, upload video files, etc. At zoboz.net, for instance, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one single place. There may be limitations depending on the form of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your site hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting packages that are conceived for particular content only.