Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service is related to keeping and/or sharing particular web content on a web server hosted by a website hosting distributor. There are various classes of hosting services used for different goals, so let's have a look at them. Doing so, you can elect what you want, depending on whether you'd like to run a web portal, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with buddies and partners.

- File hosting: a service provided by various firms, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only purpose is to share files, since it does not offer 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 explore a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free file storage solutions are often supported by displaying ads next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a certain span of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you own a paid file storage account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly fallacious explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would allocate the workload between different hosts of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending miscellaneous web hosting services (mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a type of a disk space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting kind is suitable if you wish to share an immense number of pics with buddies or partners since the solution is usually free. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to administering your e-mail addresses. Some providers offer site hosting services for websites, but do not provide an e-mail solution. If you would like to own an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to possess a website, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can set up mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no web 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 video files. You can either share a link to a specific video file, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of utilizing this method instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with several video clips and a few hundred web site viewers, you may have trouble with your web space hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will enable you to run as many videos as you wish without bothering about system supplies.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you wish to possess a site. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can create databases and mail accounts, upload video files, and so on. At BizTalk Hosting, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated server hosting accounts that enable you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in a single location. There may be restrictions based on the sort of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your webspace hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are intended for particular content only.