Classes of hosting services

A hosting service is related to storing and/or sharing particular web content on a server administered by a website hosting provider. There are different sorts of hosting services used for various ends, so let's have a look at these. Thus, you can determine what you want, depending on whether you wish to run a web page, email accounts, or to share files with pals and associates.

- File hosting: a service supplied by given file storage providers, which enables you to share immense files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single purpose is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to open .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting plans are often supported by exhibiting advertisements by the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a given interval of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you own a paid file storage package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a completely false interpretation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allocate the load between independent packs of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving various hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a variety of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; certain distributors offer a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting brand is appropriate if you desire to share a great number of images with friends or colleagues since the solution is usually free of cost. You will get a randomly generated link for each pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to handling your mail accounts. Some companies provide web space hosting services for web sites, but do not offer an email hosting service. If you would like to have an email address with your domain name but do not want to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can open mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting service includes 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 certain video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video file creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video clips and several hundred web page viewers, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will permit you to administer as many video clips as you want to without hassling about system resources.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to run a web site. To a certain degree, it involves all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can create databases and e-mail address accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Final Draft Solutions, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web hosting solutions that permit you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in a single location. There may be restrictions depending on the sort of hosting solution that you've picked - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web hosting package may be better or worse compared to the usual email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for specific web content solely.