Varieties of hosting solutions

A hosting service pertains to storing and/or sharing certain web content on a hosting server administered by a web hosting vendor. There are different kinds of hosting services used for different ends, so let's take a gaze at these. Doing so, you can conclude what you need, depending on whether you'd like to establish a weblog, e-mail accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by certain providers, which enables you to share immense files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-cost file hosting plans are frequently supported by exhibiting ads by the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific span of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a completely imprecise explanation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would divide the tasks at hand between independent hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending miscellaneous web page hosting services (mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is simply a sort of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given vendors provide a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting kind is suitable if you would like to share a big number of pics with mates or colleagues since the service is generally free of cost. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution committed to taking care of your electronic mail accounts. Some distributors offer web page hosting solutions for web pages, but do not supply an e-mail solution. If you want to launch an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a web site, then the email hosting solution is what you want. You can open mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video creates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video clips and a few hundred visitors, you may have a hard time with your website hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to have as many video files as you want to without bothering about system resources.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you want to own a website. To a certain extent, it incorporates all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your websites, you can also host pictures and files, you can keep databases and e-mail accounts, upload videos, and so on. At Heartland Web Hosting, for instance, you can take a gaze at web hosting and dedicated web hosting services that allow you to have all of the aforesaid services in one single location. There may be limitations depending on the kind of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web space hosting account may be better or worse compared to the normal email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for specific web content solely.