Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution is associated with hoarding and/or sharing certain web content on a web hosting server hosted by a website hosting distributor. There are different classes of hosting services utilized for various aims, so let's explore them. Thus, you can conclude what you need, based on whether you'd like to set up a web site, mails, or to share files with chums and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service distributed by certain providers, which lets you share immense files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single aim is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a list of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage services are often supported by displaying adverts by the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a given span of time to view 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 limitation with regard to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a completely twisted explanation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would share the workload between independent stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different site hosting services (electronic mail, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a type of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some companies provide a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting kind is suitable if you desire to share an immense quantity of images with mates or colleagues since the service is generally free of cost. You will obtain a random link for every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to handling your emails. Some distributors offer web space hosting services for websites, but do not supply an email service. If you wish to launch an email address with your domain name but do not want to run a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can set up mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video file generates a specific amount of CPU load, so with a handful of video files and several hundred web site visitors, you may have a hard time with your web space hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will permit you to possess as many videos as you wish without hassling about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to run a site. To a certain degree, it involves all of the abovementioned hosting categories since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and e-mail addresses, upload video files, etc. At GeeksCloud, for example, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting services that allow you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in a single location. There may be restrictions based on the type of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting account may be better or worse compared to the common email/file/video/image hosting packages that are intended for specific content only.