Groups of hosting services

A hosting service appertains to storing and/or sharing certain content on a web hosting server handled by a website hosting distributor. There are various varieties of hosting services utilized for various aims, so let's have a glance at them. In that way, you can elect what you want, based on whether you desire to establish a web page, e-mail addresses, or to share files with pals and associates.

- File hosting: a service delivered by particular companies, which permits you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not offer website uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-charge file storage packages are often supported by displaying adverts beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a given spell of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you get a paid file hosting plan, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting corporations, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally inappropriate interpretation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would split the load between different bunches of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving miscellaneous web site hosting services (mail, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a variety of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some corporations offer a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting brand is suitable if you would like to share a big amount of pictures with pals or acquaintances since the solution is commonly free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for each picture 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 used for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution dedicated to handling your email accounts. Some distributors offer web space hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an email hosting service. If you want to have a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to run a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can create email accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail 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 file in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video clip produces a specific amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and a few hundred site viewers, you may have difficulty with your website hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will enable you to run as many video files as you would like without hassling about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to keep a web site. To a certain degree, it includes all of the aforementioned hosting brands since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can create databases and email address accounts, upload video files, etc. At GreatHosts.biz, for example, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated hosting packages that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in a single place. There may be limits depending on the sort of hosting service that you've picked - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web hosting account may be better or worse compared to the normal email/file/video/image hosting plans that are designed for specific web content solely.