Sorts of hosting services

A hosting solution concerns depositing and/or sharing certain content on a web hosting server administered by a hosting vendor. There are different sorts of hosting services used for various aims, so let's have a look at them. In that way, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to have a web page, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with chums and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution made available by given vendors, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not offer website uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans are frequently supported by displaying ads next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a certain stretch of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you purchase a paid file storage account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the help of the cPanel hosting corporations, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is an entirely mistaken interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would split the workload between different hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different web page hosting services (electronic mail, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a brand of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; specific corporations provide a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting variant is appropriate if you would like to share a great amount of images with chums or partners since the service is usually free of charge. You will get a random link for each and 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 websites.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to tackling your mail accounts. Some providers provide hosting services for sites, but do not supply an email service. If you would like to run an e-mail address with your domain name but do not desire to run a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you want. You can create e-mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this method instead of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video clip brings about a certain amount of CPU load, so with several video files and several hundred web page viewers, you may have a hard time with your web page hosting resources. Embedding the video file will enable you to manage as many videos as you wish without worrying about system supplies.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to own a web site. To a certain extent, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can create databases and mail accounts, upload videos, and so on. At MoonServers, for example, you can take a peek at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting accounts that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in a single place. There may be limitations based on the sort of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse in comparison with the typical e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are purposed for particular web content only.