Forms of hosting services

A hosting service involves saving and/or sharing specific web content on a hosting server managed by a web hosting provider. There are different varieties of hosting services used for different ends, so let's study these. In that way, you can pick what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to establish a web portal, mailbox accounts, or to share files with mates and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service distributed by particular hosts, which enables you to share large files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a table of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free-of-charge file hosting accounts often involve advertisements beside the download links, while a timer compels you to await a specific amount of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you get a paid file hosting account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly false interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would apportion the workload between individual bunches of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous site hosting services (mail, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is simply a type of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; some corporations offer a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting brand is good if you want to share a big amount of images with comrades or associates since the service is typically free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for each and every picture or album and you can then 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 service committed to taking care of your e-mails. Some distributors offer webspace hosting solutions for websites, but do not provide an e-mail solution. If you wish to run an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a website, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can open mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this approach instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a specific amount of CPU load, so with a handful of videos and several hundred website visitors, you may have a hard time with your web site hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will permit you to keep as many video clips as you wish without worrying about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to possess a web site. To a certain extent, it consists of all of the aforesaid hosting kinds since, along with your sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can have databases and e-mail aliases, upload video clips, and so on. At V2K IT Solutions, for example, you can see web hosting and dedicated web server hosting services that enable you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one place. There may be restrictions depending on the form of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the normal email/file/video/image hosting plans that are purposed for specific content only.