Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service applies to saving and/or sharing certain web content on a server managed by a web hosting vendor. There are various forms of hosting services used for various ends, so let's take a glimpse at these. In that way, you can conclude what you need, on the basis of whether you wish to establish a weblog, mails, or to share files with chums and partners.

- File hosting: a service made available by particular file storage providers, which lets you share enormous files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting packages are often supported by displaying advertisements next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a certain stretch of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely inapt interpretation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would allot the load between different groups of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending miscellaneous web hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, webspace hosting 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 near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some firms provide a hosting service for images solely. This hosting kind is appropriate if you would like to share an immense number of images with buddies or colleagues since the solution is generally free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service dedicated to handling your e-mail addresses. Some companies provide web space hosting services for web pages, but do not supply an e-mail hosting solution. If you wish to create a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to run a site, then the email hosting service is what you require. You can set up email address accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a particular video, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file creates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a few video clips and a few hundred visitors, you may have a problem with your website hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will allow you to keep as many video clips as you want to without hassling about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you want to have a site. To some extent, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting varieties since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and emails, upload video clips, and so on. At Duo Servers, for example, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated hosting accounts that permit you to get all of the abovementioned services in a single place. There may be restrictions depending on the form of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are meant for specific web content exclusively.