Categories of hosting services

A hosting solution is related to keeping and/or sharing given web content on a web hosting server administered by a web hosting company. There are different types of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's have a glance at these. Doing so, you can pick what you need, depending on whether you'd like to launch a site, mail address accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution offered by various vendors, which allows you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single objective is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage packages are often supported by displaying ads by the download links, while a timer forces you to await a given interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation in 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 stylish "cloud hosting". This is a totally inappropriate explanation of the literal connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would split the load between independent bunches of servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various web page hosting services (mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, web space hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is merely a brand of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; specific companies offer a hosting solution for images only. This hosting variant is good if you would like to share an immense amount of images with pals or acquaintances since the solution is generally free of cost. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to handling your mail addresses. Some distributors provide website hosting services for web sites, but do not offer an email hosting service. If you want to create a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to run a site, then the email hosting service is what you want. You can open electronic mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video clip in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video file generates a given amount of CPU load, so with a few video files and several hundred website visitors, you may have a problem with your webspace hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will permit you to keep as many video clips as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you require if you want to keep a website. To some degree, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your web pages, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and mail aliases, upload video files, etc. At Galaxy Gig, for example, you can take a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated hosting packages that allow you to have all of the aforesaid services in one single place. There may be restrictions depending on the type of hosting service that you've picked - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your site hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are devised for particular content exclusively.