Kinds of hosting services

A hosting service concerns storing and/or sharing certain content on a web server run by a website hosting company. There are different kinds of hosting services used for various ends, so let's take a glimpse at them. In that way, you can decide what you want, based on whether you'd like to have a blog, mail aliases, or to share files with friends and associates.

- File hosting: a service distributed by various vendors, which lets you share bulky files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole aim is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-charge file storage solutions are often supported by showing advertisements by the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a certain stretch of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly distorted explanation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would split the load between separate groups of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different web page hosting services (mail, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, web hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a kind of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; certain vendors offer a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting type is good if you wish to share a big amount of pics with mates or partners since the service is commonly free. You will obtain a random link for every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to managing your e-mail aliases. Some vendors offer web site hosting services for sites, but do not supply an e-mail solution. If you would like to create a mail address with your domain name but do not want to keep a website, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can open email address accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video in your site 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 produces a particular amount of CPU load, so with several video clips and several hundred web site viewers, you may have difficulty with your web page hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will permit you to own as many video files as you want without hassling about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to run a website. To a certain degree, it includes all of the aforementioned hosting kinds since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can keep databases and e-mail accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Grab Bag Hosting, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts that enable you to have all of the abovementioned services in one single location. There may be limits depending on the sort of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web space hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the regular email/file/video/image hosting packages that are made for specific content exclusively.