Categories of hosting services

A hosting service applies to storing and/or sharing certain web content on a web hosting server administered by a website hosting supplier. There are different classes of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's have a glimpse at these. In that way, you can conclude what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to have a website, e-mail accounts, or to share files with buddies and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service distributed by certain providers, which lets you share big files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not offer website uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a list of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file storage plans frequently include advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a certain span of time to perceive them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely inappropriate explanation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would assign the tasks at hand between independent groups of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different website hosting services (mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is just a sort of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; certain distributors provide a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you want to share a vast number of pics with buddies or colleagues since the service is usually free of cost. You will obtain a random link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to managing your mails. Some distributors provide web page hosting services for web sites, but do not provide an e-mail solution. If you would like to manage an email address with your domain name but do not desire to own a website, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can create mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain 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 file in a web hosting account is that the video clip generates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and several hundred site visitors, you may have trouble with your website hosting resources. Embedding the video will permit you to run as many videos as you desire without bothering about system supplies.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to run a website. To some degree, it comprises all of the aforesaid hosting varieties since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and email address accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Exclusive Hosting, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts that allow you to have all of the abovementioned services in a single place. There may be limitations based on the kind of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting account may be better or worse compared to the regular email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are tailored for particular content exclusively.