Categories of hosting services

A hosting service implies stockpiling and/or sharing certain content on a web hosting server administered by a web hosting distributor. There are different kinds of hosting services used for different ends, so let's take a glance at them. In this way, you can conclude what you need, depending on whether you'd like to have a web site, mail addresses, or to share files with pals and associates.

- File hosting: a solution furnished by some providers, which lets you share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single designation is to share files, since it does not offer website uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to read an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting services are frequently supported by displaying advertisements beside the download links, while a timer forces you to await a given interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you have a paid file storage package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limit with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a totally incongruous explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would distribute the workload between separate packs of hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different webspace hosting services (email, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, webspace hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is only a kind of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; certain vendors provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is appropriate if you desire to share a great quantity of pics with friends or colleagues since the solution is typically free. You will get a random link for each and every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution dedicated to administering your email box accounts. Some distributors provide site hosting services for web sites, but do not offer an email hosting solution. If you desire to run an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can set up mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this method in lieu of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file generates a given amount of CPU load, so with a few video clips and a few hundred website viewers, you may have difficulty with your hosting resources. Embedding the video will permit you to have as many videos as you would like without bothering about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to run a web site. To a certain degree, it embodies all of the aforementioned hosting kinds since, along with your websites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and e-mailbox accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At Professional Internet Services, for instance, you can take a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated hosting accounts that enable you to have all of the aforesaid services in a single place. There may be limitations based on the type of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting account may be better or worse compared to the typical e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are created for particular web content exclusively.