Categories of hosting services

A hosting service suggests storing and/or sharing certain content on a web server run by a hosting vendor. There are different kinds of hosting services used for different ends, so let's take a look at them. In this way, you can pick what you want, on the basis of whether you wish to set up a website, e-mail address accounts, or to share files with friends and associates.

- File hosting: a service made available by various firms, which enables you to share large files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file storage accounts are frequently supported by displaying ads beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a particular spell of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly fallacious interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would split the workload between individual hosts of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving various web site hosting services (mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; given distributors provide a hosting solution for pictures solely. This hosting variant is appropriate if you would like to share an enormous number of pictures with chums or associates since the solution is usually free of cost. You will receive a random link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to taking care of your mailbox accounts. Some vendors offer web space hosting services for web sites, but do not provide an email hosting solution. If you would like to manage an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you require. You can set up email box accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file produces a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video clips and a few hundred visitors, you may have trouble with your web hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will allow you to manage as many video files as you would like without hassling about system resources.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to run a web site. To some extent, it involves all of the aforementioned hosting varieties since, along with your sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and email accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Exclusive Hosting, for instance, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting solutions that enable you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in a single location. There may be limitations based on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web space hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are purposed for specific web content solely.