Forms of hosting solutions

A hosting service suggests storing and/or sharing given content on a hosting server hosted by a web hosting company. There are various groups of hosting services used for different ends, so let's survey them. Doing so, you can elect what you need, depending on whether you'd like to launch a web site, mails, or to share files with comrades and associates.

- File hosting: a service delivered by certain providers, which allows you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not offer web site 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 examine a table 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-cost file storage packages are often supported by exhibiting advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a certain spell of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you own a paid file storage package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting retailers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a completely inapt interpretation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would distribute the tasks at hand between separate stacks of servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various web hosting services (email, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a type of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given distributors offer a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting type is appropriate if you desire to share a vast amount of pics with comrades or acquaintances since the solution is mostly free of cost. You will obtain 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 compatible, so the solution cannot be used for sites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to tackling your email accounts. Some providers provide web page hosting solutions for sites, but do not provide an e-mail service. If you would like to manage an email address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can create e-mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video, or you can embed the video file in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video creates a given amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video files and a few hundred web page visitors, you may have trouble with your site hosting supplies. Embedding the video will allow you to keep as many video files as you want to without bothering about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you require if you desire to own a website. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting forms since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can have databases and email addresses, upload videos, and so on. At CrownHost, for example, you can explore web hosting and dedicated hosting accounts that permit you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in a single location. There may be restrictions based on the sort of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting package may be better or worse compared with the conventional email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are created for specific web content solely.