Kinds of hosting services
A hosting service concerns depositing and/or sharing specific web content on a web server hosted by a web hosting company. There are various categories of hosting services used for different ends, so let's review them. In that way, you can pick what you need, based on whether you wish to set up a web site, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with comrades and partners.
- File hosting: a solution furnished by some firms, which allows you to share large files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only aim is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans are often supported by showing adverts by the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a certain stretch of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file hosting package, 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.
At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a totally incongruous explanation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would allot the load between separate stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending various website hosting services (email, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a sort of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.
- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; certain providers provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting kind is good if you want to share a great quantity of pictures with pals or associates since the service is commonly free of charge. You will obtain a randomly generated link for every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for web pages.
- E-mail hosting: a service committed to tackling your mail aliases. Some firms offer hosting services for websites, but do not provide an email hosting solution. If you want to launch a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to run a site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can set up mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.
- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video generates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a handful of video clips and several hundred website viewers, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting resources. Embedding the video file will enable you to operate as many videos as you want to without bothering about system quotas.
- Website hosting: this is the service that you require if you want to own a site. To a certain degree, it contains all of the abovementioned hosting categories since, along with your websites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and email box accounts, upload videos, etc. At Universal-Hosting, for instance, you can take a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated server hosting accounts that permit you to have all of the aforementioned services in a single place. There may be limits depending on the form of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web space hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting packages that are created for particular content only.