Forms of hosting services
A hosting service entails saving and/or sharing given content on a hosting server handled by a website hosting distributor. There are various forms of hosting services used for different goals, so let's review them. Doing so, you can choose what you want, depending on whether you wish to build a site, e-mail accounts, or to share files with comrades and associates.
- File hosting: a solution delivered by various firms, which allows you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole objective is to share files, since it does not offer website 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 explore a register of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting plans often involve ads beside the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific interval of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file hosting package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limit with regard to the download speed or the file size.
These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a totally incongruous explanation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would divide the load between separate bunches of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different web space hosting services (electronic mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is just a sort of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.
- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; given providers offer a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is suitable if you want to share a huge quantity of images with comrades or colleagues since the solution is commonly free of cost. You will obtain a random link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for web pages.
- E-mail hosting: a service dedicated to managing your mail address accounts. Some companies offer webspace hosting services for sites, but do not provide an e-mail solution. If you desire to manage an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to run a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you want. You can set up mail address 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 service permits you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a certain video clip, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a given amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of videos and several hundred viewers, you may have difficulty with your site hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will allow you to keep as many video files as you would like without hassling about system supplies.
- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to own a site. To some degree, it encompasses all of the aforesaid hosting brands since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and mail accounts, upload video files, etc. At Web Hosting Indy, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages that allow you to have all of the abovementioned services in one location. There may be limits based on the type of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting account may be better or worse compared with the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are designed for specific content only.