Classes of hosting services

A hosting service is connected with stockpiling and/or sharing certain content on a web hosting server administered by a hosting company. There are different classes of hosting services used for different aims, so let's take a peek at these. Thus, you can decide what you need, depending on whether you'd like to launch a website, e-mail addresses, or to share files with friends and partners.

- File hosting: a service furnished by various providers, which enables you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file hosting accounts frequently involve advertisements beside the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a particular amount of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file hosting plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, 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 distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a totally mistaken interpretation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would split the workload between separate sets of servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different website hosting services (mail, web space, stats, DNS, databases, Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is only a type of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; certain suppliers provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is good if you desire to share a huge number of pictures with friends or colleagues since the service is usually free. You will receive a random link for each and every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to administering your mail address accounts. Some companies provide webspace hosting services for web sites, but do not offer an e-mail hosting solution. If you want to run an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to own a site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can open mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video clip generates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred website visitors, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting resources. Embedding the video file will permit you to run as many videos as you desire without worrying about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to run a web site. To some extent, it incorporates all of the aforementioned hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and e-mail addresses, upload video clips, and so on. At WebHost-ing.com, for instance, you can observe web hosting and dedicated hosting services that enable you to have all of the aforementioned solutions in a single place. There may be limitations depending on the type of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are planned for specific web content only.