Groups of hosting services

A hosting solution includes saving and/or sharing specific content on a server administered by a website hosting provider. There are different categories of hosting services used for various goals, so let's have a look at them. Thus, you can choose what you want, based on whether you'd like to own a web page, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with mates and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution supplied by given web hosts, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file hosting packages often include adverts next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a given spell 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 limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a totally unsuitable explanation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would apportion the workload between separate stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various web page hosting services (mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a kind of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given corporations provide a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting brand is appropriate if you would like to share a vast number of pics with mates or colleagues since the solution is commonly free. You will get a random link for every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to managing your e-mails. Some suppliers offer web space hosting solutions for web sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting solution. If you want to set up a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to run a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can open e-mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a specific amount of CPU load, so with a few videos and several hundred viewers, you may have trouble with your web hosting resources. Embedding the video file will enable you to manage as many videos as you would like without bothering about system supplies.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to have a web site. To some degree, it comprises all of the aforementioned hosting types since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and email accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At AfterHost, for instance, you can view web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages that enable you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single place. There may be restrictions depending on the sort of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the conventional email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are purposed for particular content only.