Varieties of hosting solutions
A hosting service concerns depositing and/or sharing particular content on a server run by a web hosting vendor. There are various groups of hosting services used for various ends, so let's have a look at them. Thus, you can determine what you want, based on whether you wish to launch a web site, email mailbox accounts, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.
- File hosting: a solution supplied by certain vendors, which enables you to share huge files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole objective is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting solutions are often supported by showing adverts by the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a particular stretch of time to view 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 at once, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.
Nowadays, with the help of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely imprecise interpretation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would distribute the tasks at hand between individual groups of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving miscellaneous web hosting services (electronic mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is just a type of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.
- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; specific vendors offer a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting type is appropriate if you desire to share a huge number of images with buddies or associates since the solution is commonly free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for each and every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.
- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to tackling your e-mail aliases. Some distributors provide web space hosting solutions for web pages, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you want to get an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to possess a website, then the email hosting service is what you want. You can open email mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.
- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a particular video, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video clip produces a specific amount of central processing unit load, so with a few video clips and a few hundred visitors, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to keep as many video files as you would like without hassling about system supplies.
- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to keep a web site. To some degree, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting forms since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and mail aliases, upload videos, and so on. At Tehnodar hosting, for example, you can see web hosting and dedicated hosting services that enable you to have all of the aforesaid services in a single place. There may be limits depending on the kind of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web hosting package may be better or worse in comparison with the regular email/file/video/image hosting packages that are designed for specific web content exclusively.