Groups of hosting solutions

A hosting service means saving and/or sharing certain web content on a server managed by a website hosting provider. There are various classes of hosting services utilized for different purposes, so let's have a glimpse at these. In that way, you can choose what you need, depending on whether you wish to have a website, mailbox accounts, or to share files with buddies and associates.

- File hosting: a service provided by given file storage providers, which lets you share huge files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its only designation is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free file storage accounts often include ads beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a particular interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is an entirely inapt explanation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would assign the load between different packs of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending different web page hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a type of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting brand is suitable if you would like to share a vast amount of pictures with buddies or colleagues since the service is generally free. You will get a random link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for sites.

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

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file produces a specific amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and a few hundred site visitors, you may have difficulty with your site hosting supplies. Embedding the video file will allow you to utilize as many video clips as you want to without bothering about system resources.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to have a website. To a certain degree, it incorporates all of the aforementioned hosting categories since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and mail accounts, upload video files, etc. At Webix Hosting - Your Affordable Web Solution!, for example, you can see web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts that enable you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single location. There may be limits based on the kind of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the normal email/file/video/image hosting packages that are designed for specific content exclusively.