Forms of hosting solutions

A hosting service concerns hoarding and/or sharing certain content on a hosting server run by a hosting company. There are different categories of hosting services used for different aims, so let's survey them. Doing so, you can decide what you want, based on whether you desire to create a blog, e-mail aliases, or to share files with comrades and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution made available by various vendors, which enables you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free file hosting accounts often include advertisements beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a specific stretch of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you possess a paid file storage package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a totally improper explanation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would allot the tasks at hand between different hosts of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving various webspace hosting services (email, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, webspace hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is only a kind of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; specific providers provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting variant is suitable if you wish to share an enormous amount of pics with comrades or associates since the service is usually free. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution committed to tackling your email addresses. Some companies provide web space hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an e-mail service. If you desire to own a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to possess a website, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can set up electronic mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a specific video file, or you can embed the video file in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video creates a certain amount of CPU load, so with several video files and several hundred site visitors, you may have a hard time with your web site hosting reserves. Embedding the video will allow you to manage as many videos as you want to without bothering about system quotas.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you would like to have a web site. To a certain extent, it involves all of the abovementioned hosting forms since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and mailbox accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At HostingBox, for instance, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated server hosting accounts that enable you to get all of the abovementioned solutions in a single location. There may be limitations based on the type of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your webspace hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the regular email/file/video/image hosting packages that are planned for particular web content exclusively.