Types of hosting services
A hosting service concerns saving and/or sharing certain content on a web hosting server handled by a web hosting distributor. There are various classes of hosting services used for various goals, so let's study them. In that way, you can elect what you need, based on whether you desire to build a web site, emails, or to share files with chums and partners.
- File hosting: a service supplied by certain hosts, which enables you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only goal is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally created 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 see .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting accounts are often supported by displaying advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a particular stretch of time to perceive them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted 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 restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.
Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is an entirely inaccurate interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would divide the tasks at hand between autonomous bunches of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving miscellaneous webspace hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is only a sort of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.
- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given vendors provide a hosting solution for images solely. This hosting type is appropriate if you desire to share a big amount of images with friends or acquaintances since the solution is commonly free of charge. You will get a randomly generated link for every 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 service cannot be utilized for web pages.
- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to managing your e-mailbox accounts. Some distributors offer web space hosting services for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail service. If you want to open an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can open mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.
- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file creates a particular amount of CPU load, so with several video clips and a few hundred visitors, you may have trouble with your web hosting supplies. Embedding the video file will enable you to manage as many videos as you want without worrying about system resources.
- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to possess a site. To some degree, it includes all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can keep databases and e-mailbox accounts, upload video files, and so on. At WebHost-ing.com, for example, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated hosting solutions that permit you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one single place. There may be limitations depending on the type of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the common email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are purposed for specific web content exclusively.