Types of hosting services

A hosting solution entails hoarding and/or sharing specific content on a server hosted by a website hosting supplier. There are different classes of hosting services used for different aims, so let's have a glimpse at them. Thus, you can determine what you want, based on whether you'd like to run a weblog, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by some web hosts, which permits you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole function is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a list of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting services are often supported by showing advertisements beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a given period of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely erroneous interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allot the workload between independent stacks of web servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is only a kind of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; some companies offer a hosting service for images only. This hosting variant is good if you want to share a vast number of images with pals or associates since the service is commonly free of cost. You will get a random link for each and every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to taking care of your electronic mail accounts. Some vendors offer hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail solution. If you wish to launch a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to own a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you need. You can set up mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this method instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video clip produces a given amount of CPU load, so with several video clips and several hundred website visitors, you may have difficulty with your web site hosting reserves. Embedding the video will permit you to run as many video files as you want to without worrying about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to possess a website. To a certain degree, it consists of all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and e-mail aliases, upload video files, etc. At hostonfire.uk, for instance, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that enable you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one location. There may be limits based on the type of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting package may be better or worse compared to the regular email/file/video/image hosting packages that are devised for specific content exclusively.