Classes of hosting services

A hosting solution is connected with stashing and/or sharing certain web content on a web hosting server handled by a website hosting provider. There are different kinds of hosting services used for various purposes, so let's explore them. In this way, you can determine what you want, based on whether you desire to launch a web page, e-mail address accounts, or to share files with buddies and partners.

- File hosting: a service furnished by certain file storage providers, which enables you to share huge files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, and so on. 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 get an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to open .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans frequently include advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a certain interval of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file hosting account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, 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 providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a totally erroneous explanation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would allocate the workload between separate stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different site hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a sort of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting service for images only. This hosting variant is good if you would like to share a great number of pics with buddies or acquaintances since the solution is mostly free. You will obtain a randomly generated link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a solution dedicated to taking care of your e-mailbox accounts. Some companies offer web site hosting services for websites, but do not offer an e-mail hosting solution. If you wish to own an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to keep a web site, then the email hosting service is what you want. You can set up mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a few videos and a few hundred web page visitors, you may have trouble with your web hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will enable you to possess as many video files as you want without hassling about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to own a site. To some degree, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting varieties since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and e-mail accounts, upload video files, etc. At Webhosting Action, for instance, you can have a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one place. There may be restrictions based on the sort of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your site hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the usual e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are meant for particular web content exclusively.