Types of hosting solutions

A hosting service means storing and/or sharing certain content on a web server handled by a hosting provider. There are various forms of hosting services utilized for various ends, so let's survey these. Thus, you can elect what you want, on the basis of whether you wish to own a web site, mail aliases, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution made available by given companies, which lets you share enormous 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 website uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting packages are often supported by exhibiting advertisements by the download links, while a timer makes you await a given span of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file storage account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a totally untrue explanation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would divide the tasks at hand between autonomous stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different web page hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is only a brand of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific suppliers provide a hosting service for images solely. This hosting variant is good if you wish to share an enormous number of images with comrades or acquaintances since the service is commonly free. You will receive a random 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 supported, so the service cannot be utilized for web sites.

- Email hosting: a service committed to managing your electronic mail accounts. Some suppliers provide webspace hosting services for web sites, but do not supply an email service. If you want to manage an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to run a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can create mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video clip generates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with several video clips and a few hundred viewers, you may have difficulty with your web page hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will allow you to possess as many video files as you want without worrying about system reserves.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to own a website. To some extent, it involves all of the aforesaid hosting forms since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and email addresses, upload videos, etc. At Best Host Cities, for instance, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting solutions that enable you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one single location. There may be limits depending on the sort of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the usual email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are purposed for specific content exclusively.