Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service means storing and/or sharing given content on a web hosting server handled by a hosting provider. There are various categories of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's take a peek at them. In this way, you can decide what you need, on the basis of whether you desire to have a site, mail accounts, or to share files with chums and partners.

- File hosting: a service offered by certain web hosts, which enables you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. The moment 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 record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-charge file storage services often involve advertisements by the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a certain interval of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally inapt interpretation of the literal connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would share the load between independent bunches of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different web space hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a type of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; certain vendors offer a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you desire to share a great amount of pics with friends or associates since the service is typically free. You will receive a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to handling your mail accounts. Some firms offer web space hosting services for web sites, but do not offer an e-mail solution. If you want to get an email address with your domain name but do not want to have a site, then the email hosting solution is what you want. You can set up email box accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a particular video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this method in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video file creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a few videos and several hundred website viewers, you may have a problem with your web page hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to possess as many videos as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you wish to own a website. To some extent, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting types since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and email box accounts, upload video files, etc. At webflask, for instance, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated server hosting solutions that enable you to have all of the abovementioned services in a single location. There may be limitations depending on the form of hosting service that you've picked - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web page hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the regular e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are purposed for specific web content solely.