Varieties of hosting services

A hosting service appertains to stockpiling and/or sharing particular web content on a web hosting server managed by a hosting provider. There are different categories of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's take a look at them. Doing so, you can determine what you want, based on whether you'd like to have a site, e-mail aliases, or to share files with chums and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution offered by certain firms, which enables you to share huge files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived files, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a register of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to open .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting services often involve adverts next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a particular interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file storage plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the help of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is an entirely awry explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would distribute the workload between autonomous packs of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving various web space hosting services (email, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a brand of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; specific vendors offer a hosting solution for images only. This hosting kind is suitable if you would like to share a huge amount of images with pals or partners since the solution is generally free of charge. You will get a random link for every picture or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to administering your mail addresses. Some distributors provide webspace hosting services for websites, but do not provide an email hosting solution. If you desire to create a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to have a web site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can create email 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 e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a certain video, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video generates a specific amount of central processing unit load, so with a couple of video files and a few hundred website viewers, you may have a hard time with your web space hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will permit you to utilize as many video clips as you desire without bothering about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you require if you desire to keep a site. To a certain extent, it comprises all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your websites, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and mails, upload videos, and so on. At WebLakay, for example, you can have a gaze at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting plans that allow you to have all of the aforesaid services in one place. There may be restrictions depending on the form of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web space hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting packages that are tailored for specific web content exclusively.