Types of hosting solutions

A hosting service involves depositing and/or sharing given web content on a hosting server administered by a hosting vendor. There are different kinds of hosting services used for various goals, so let's review them. In that way, you can pick what you need, depending on whether you desire to set up a web site, electronic mail accounts, or to share files with comrades and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service offered by certain vendors, which permits you to share large files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only function is to share files, since it does not offer site 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 survey a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file storage packages are frequently supported by exhibiting adverts beside the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a given interval of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you have a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no restriction when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is an entirely amiss interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would share the tasks at hand between independent hosts of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending miscellaneous web page hosting services (mail, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, web hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a kind of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; certain firms offer a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting kind is good if you want to share a big quantity of pictures with friends or acquaintances since the solution is usually free. You will receive a randomly generated link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service dedicated to taking care of your e-mails. Some distributors provide web hosting solutions for web sites, but do not supply an e-mail solution. If you wish to possess a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to keep a website, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can create email box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video clip creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a few videos and a few hundred web site visitors, you may have trouble with your web site hosting resources. Embedding the video file will allow you to run as many video clips as you wish without bothering about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to keep a web site. To a certain extent, it involves all of the aforesaid hosting types since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and e-mail aliases, upload video clips, and so on. At MarbleHost.com, for instance, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web hosting services that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one single location. There may be limits based on the kind of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your webspace hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are designed for particular web content solely.