Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service appertains to storing and/or sharing given content on a hosting server handled by a hosting provider. There are different categories of hosting services used for various aims, so let's have a peek at these. Doing so, you can determine what you need, on the basis of whether you desire to establish a web page, email accounts, or to share files with buddies and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service distributed by various file storage providers, which enables you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole purpose is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting packages are frequently supported by exhibiting adverts by the download links, while a timer compels you to await a specific span of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you get a paid file hosting package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting corporations, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a completely incorrect interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would allocate the tasks at hand between autonomous hosts of servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending miscellaneous hosting services (mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a variety of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; specific distributors provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting kind is suitable if you want to share a great quantity of images with mates or acquaintances since the solution is usually free. You will obtain a random link for every picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for web pages.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to managing your mail addresses. Some distributors offer web space hosting solutions for sites, but do not provide an email service. If you would like to possess a mail address with your domain name but do not want to keep a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can create mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this method in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file creates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and several hundred viewers, you may have trouble with your hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will permit you to own as many videos as you desire without bothering about system resources.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to have a web site. To some degree, it contains all of the aforementioned hosting types since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and e-mail accounts, upload videos, etc. At Ikaros Web Hosting, for example, you can take a peek at web hosting and dedicated server hosting packages that enable you to get all of the aforesaid services in one single location. There may be limitations depending on the form 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 website hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the routine email/file/video/image hosting plans that are planned for particular web content only.