Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service appertains to saving and/or sharing given content on a server administered by a hosting provider. There are various forms of hosting services used for different aims, so let's take a glance at these. Thus, you can determine what you need, based on whether you wish to build a website, e-mailbox accounts, or to share files with pals and partners.

- File hosting: a service provided by particular hosts, which allows you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans are frequently supported by displaying ads next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a certain amount of time to perceive them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file storage account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation with regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a totally twisted interpretation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would apportion the workload between different groups of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving miscellaneous site hosting services (email, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a sort of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; specific vendors offer a hosting solution for images only. This hosting kind is appropriate if you wish to share a huge number of images with friends or colleagues since the service is mostly free of charge. You will receive a random link for each image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to managing your mails. Some firms provide web site hosting solutions for websites, but do not supply an email hosting solution. If you wish to create an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to possess a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you want. You can create e-mail box accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video file in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing this method instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video generates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a few video files and several hundred visitors, you may have a hard time with your webspace hosting quotas. Embedding the video will permit you to run as many videos as you desire without bothering about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to keep a website. To some degree, it contains all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your web sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can run databases and e-mailbox accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At PC Aid Hosting, for instance, you can take a peek at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting accounts that allow you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single place. There may be limits based on the form of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the normal email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for particular content solely.