Groups of hosting services

A hosting service pertains to storing and/or sharing given content on a server run by a web hosting vendor. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's take a glance at them. In that way, you can pick what you want, based on whether you'd like to launch a web site, mail accounts, or to share files with chums and partners.

- File hosting: a service distributed by certain firms, which allows you to share big files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only goal is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting plans are frequently supported by displaying ads by the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific period of time to perceive them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Now, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly improper interpretation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would share the load between different stacks of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different site hosting services (mail, web space, stats, DNS, databases, hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a brand of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given providers provide a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting variant is appropriate if you want to share an enormous number of pictures with friends or partners since the service is typically free of charge. You will get a randomly generated link for each 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 solution cannot be used for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to handling your mailbox accounts. Some vendors offer hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an e-mail hosting solution. If you would like to create an email address with your domain name but do not wish to own a website, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open email box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video file, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this method in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a given amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of videos and a few hundred web site viewers, you may have a hard time with your site hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will permit you to operate as many videos as you would like without worrying about system resources.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you need if you desire to run a website. To a certain degree, it consists of all of the aforesaid hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can keep databases and email addresses, upload videos, etc. At Fast Cloud Server, for instance, you can take a peek at web hosting and dedicated hosting services that permit you to have all of the aforementioned services in one place. There may be restrictions depending on the form of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the typical e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are created for specific content exclusively.