Varieties of hosting services

A hosting service refers to stockpiling and/or sharing specific content on a web hosting server managed by a web hosting company. There are various types of hosting services used for different goals, so let's take a look at them. In that way, you can choose what you need, depending on whether you wish to set up a web site, e-mailbox accounts, or to share files with chums and partners.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by particular firms, which enables you to share large files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to see 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-of-charge file hosting solutions are frequently supported by displaying ads beside the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a certain amount of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you own a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly mistaken interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would apportion the workload between autonomous bunches of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different site hosting services (electronic mail, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is just a variety of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some providers offer a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting variant is suitable if you desire to share a large number of pics with friends or acquaintances since the service is typically free. You will receive a randomly generated link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to taking care of your email aliases. Some firms offer webspace hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an email service. If you would like to open a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to own a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can create electronic mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution 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 video files. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this approach instead of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred web page visitors, you may have difficulty with your hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will enable you to have as many video clips as you wish without bothering about system supplies.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you wish to own a website. To some degree, it consists of all of the abovementioned hosting groups since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and email aliases, upload videos, and so on. At Softcare Servers, for example, you can see web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that permit you to have all of the aforesaid services in a single location. There may be restrictions depending on the sort of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse compared with the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for particular web content only.