Varieties of hosting solutions
A hosting solution involves stockpiling and/or sharing certain web content on a server managed by a web hosting vendor. There are different groups of hosting services utilized for different ends, so let's take a glance at them. Doing so, you can elect what you want, depending on whether you wish to set up a web page, email mailbox accounts, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.
- File hosting: a service provided by certain providers, which allows you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a table of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to open .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage plans are often supported by showing ads beside the download links, while a timer compels you to await a given interval of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you own a paid file storage package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit with regard to the download speed or the file size.
These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely imprecise explanation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would apportion the tasks at hand between individual groups of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving various website hosting services (mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a kind of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.
- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given vendors offer a hosting solution for images only. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share a big quantity of pictures with comrades or colleagues since the solution is generally free. You will get a random link for each and every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for sites.
- E-mail hosting: a service dedicated to tackling your e-mail aliases. Some corporations offer web site hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you wish to set up an email address with your domain name but do not want to possess a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can create e-mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.
- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of utilizing this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video file creates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video clips and a few hundred visitors, you may have difficulty with your hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will permit you to operate as many video clips as you wish without hassling about system quotas.
- Web site hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to run a web site. To a certain degree, it contains all of the aforementioned hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and mails, upload videos, and so on. At Applied Technologies, for example, you can have a peek at web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that allow you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single location. There may be limitations depending on the kind of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the normal email/file/video/image hosting plans that are devised for particular content solely.