Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service entails stockpiling and/or sharing specific content on a hosting server managed by a hosting company. There are different varieties of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's take a glimpse at these. In this way, you can determine what you want, on the basis of whether you desire to launch a blog, e-mail addresses, or to share files with comrades and partners.

- File hosting: a service offered by various firms, which permits you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single objective is to share files, since it does not offer 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 examine a table of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage services often involve advertisements beside the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a specific stretch of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file storage account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limit in regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a totally false interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would assign the load between autonomous stacks of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous site hosting services (mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, web space hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is merely a variety of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given providers offer a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting type is good if you wish to share an immense amount of images with chums or associates since the service is typically free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for web sites.

- Email hosting: a solution dedicated to taking care of your mail aliases. Some companies offer web page hosting services for sites, but do not offer an e-mail solution. If you would like to possess a mail address with your domain name but do not want to possess a web site, then the email hosting service is what you require. You can create mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a specific video, or you can embed the video file in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip creates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with several video clips and several hundred web site viewers, you may have difficulty with your webspace hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will enable you to administer as many video clips as you want without bothering about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to run a site. To a certain extent, it embodies all of the aforementioned hosting types since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can have databases and email addresses, upload video files, and so on. At FastFlashWeb, for instance, you can have a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated hosting solutions that enable you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one location. There may be limits depending on the sort of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting account may be better or worse compared to the common email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are meant for particular content solely.