Varieties of hosting services

A hosting solution entails saving and/or sharing specific content on a web server managed by a website hosting vendor. There are different kinds of hosting services utilized for various purposes, so let's examine them. Thus, you can pick what you want, based on whether you'd like to own a web portal, emails, or to share files with comrades and partners.

- File hosting: a solution furnished by certain vendors, which allows you to share immense files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read an index of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage packages are frequently supported by showing advertisements next to the download links, while a timer makes you await a particular span of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you own a paid file storage plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Now, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a completely mistaken interpretation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would split the tasks at hand between independent hosts of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different web page hosting services (mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a sort of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; given firms offer a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is appropriate if you would like to share a large number of images with buddies or associates since the service is generally free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for each pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for websites.

- Email hosting: a service devoted to managing your e-mail aliases. Some companies offer website hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an email hosting solution. If you desire to set up an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you require. You can set up email accounts and administer 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 enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this method in lieu of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video files and several hundred website visitors, you may have a problem with your website hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will allow you to run as many video clips as you would like without bothering about system quotas.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to run a web site. To a certain degree, it incorporates all of the aforesaid hosting varieties since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can have databases and mailbox accounts, upload video files, etc. At AfterHost, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that enable you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in one single location. There may be limits depending on the kind of hosting service that you've picked - 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 in comparison with the conventional email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are intended for particular content exclusively.