Varieties of hosting solutions

A hosting service is associated with saving and/or sharing particular content on a web server administered by a web hosting vendor. There are different categories of hosting services utilized for different ends, so let's have a peek at these. In this way, you can decide what you want, based on whether you'd like to have a web page, e-mail aliases, or to share files with mates and partners.

- File hosting: a solution supplied by particular file storage providers, which lets you share immense files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single purpose is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage services are frequently supported by exhibiting advertisements by the download links, while a timer makes you await a certain interval of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file hosting plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting corporations, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely unsuitable interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would apportion the load between individual hosts of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different web space hosting services (email, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is simply a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; specific companies provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share a vast number of images with buddies or colleagues since the solution is usually free of charge. You will receive a random link for each pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to administering your mail address accounts. Some suppliers provide site hosting services for sites, but do not provide an email hosting solution. If you want to create a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to have a website, then the email hosting service is what you want. You can create e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your web page 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 generates a given amount of CPU load, so with a few video files and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have trouble with your web site hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will enable you to have as many videos as you want without bothering about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to keep a site. To a certain degree, it comprises all of the aforementioned hosting forms since, along with your sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can keep databases and email aliases, upload video clips, and so on. At CypttonHost, for example, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated web hosting solutions that allow you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in a single place. There may be limits depending on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web page hosting package may be better or worse compared to the common email/file/video/image hosting plans that are devised for particular content solely.