Forms of hosting services

A hosting solution refers to keeping and/or sharing specific content on a web server handled by a web hosting distributor. There are various sorts of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's have a peek at these. In this way, you can decide what you want, on the basis of whether you desire to establish a web page, e-mail addresses, or to share files with comrades and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution furnished by various companies, which enables 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 only objective is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a record of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file hosting packages frequently involve ads beside the download links, while a timer makes you await a certain spell of time to perceive them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you have a paid file storage account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the help of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a totally incongruous interpretation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would apportion the workload between independent hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various hosting services (email, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given firms offer a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting brand is good if you want to share a huge quantity of pictures with buddies or colleagues since the service is mostly free of cost. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every pic 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 utilized for web pages.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to tackling your email addresses. Some providers provide site hosting solutions for sites, but do not supply an e-mail solution. If you wish to launch an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to keep a website, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can open email mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a given amount of CPU load, so with several video files and several hundred site visitors, you may have difficulty with your website hosting supplies. Embedding the video file will enable you to use as many video clips as you wish without hassling about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you require if you wish to own a website. To some extent, it includes all of the abovementioned hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and e-mailbox accounts, upload videos, and so on. At JoshWho Hosting, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated web hosting plans that allow you to get all of the aforesaid services in one single place. There may be limits depending on the form of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting package may be better or worse compared with the regular e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are meant for specific web content only.