Types of hosting solutions

A hosting service refers to saving and/or sharing specific content on a web server run by a web hosting provider. There are different varieties of hosting services used for various aims, so let's take a gaze at them. Thus, you can conclude what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to run a blog, mail aliases, or to share files with chums and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution made available by given hosts, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file hosting services often involve ads beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific span of time to view them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly incongruous explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would allot the load between individual groups of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different hosting services (electronic mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a kind of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you desire to share an immense amount of images with pals or colleagues since the service is commonly free. You will get a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be utilized for web pages.

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

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this method instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video generates a certain amount of CPU load, so with a handful of videos and several hundred web site visitors, you may have a problem with your web page hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will enable you to keep as many video clips as you want to without hassling about system resources.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to have a web site. To some extent, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and mailbox accounts, upload videos, etc. At Hosting.com.ru, for example, you can see web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that enable you to have all of the abovementioned services in one single location. There may be restrictions depending on the kind of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your site hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the routine e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are meant for specific web content exclusively.