Groups of hosting solutions

A hosting service involves storing and/or sharing specific content on a hosting server handled by a web hosting vendor. There are various categories of hosting services used for different ends, so let's have a glance at these. In that way, you can determine what you need, depending on whether you'd like to set up a website, email aliases, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by various vendors, which lets you share bulky files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only aim is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey an index of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file storage services often involve ads beside the download links, while a timer forces you to await a certain spell of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file storage account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a totally incorrect interpretation of the literal denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would share the workload between independent bunches of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving various site hosting services (mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; certain companies provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting brand is suitable if you would like to share a huge quantity of images with friends or acquaintances since the service is generally free. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for web pages.

- Email hosting: a service devoted to tackling your email aliases. Some vendors provide webspace hosting solutions for web pages, but do not supply an email hosting service. If you wish to launch a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can set up mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip generates a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with a couple of video files and a few hundred website visitors, you may have a problem with your web site hosting supplies. Embedding the video will allow you to possess as many video files as you would like without hassling about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you need if you wish to run a web site. To a certain degree, it includes all of the abovementioned hosting kinds since, along with your websites, you can also host pictures and files, you can have databases and mail accounts, upload videos, etc. At Exclusive Hosting, for example, you can explore web hosting and dedicated hosting accounts that enable you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one place. There may be limitations depending on the form of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web page hosting account may be better or worse compared to the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are meant for specific web content only.