Varieties of hosting solutions

A hosting service refers to saving and/or sharing certain content on a server handled by a web hosting distributor. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different goals, so let's have a glance at them. In that way, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you wish to establish a site, email accounts, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service supplied by particular providers, which allows you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single objective is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either obtain a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file storage solutions are often supported by exhibiting advertisements beside the download links, while a timer compels you to await a particular amount of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Nowadays, with the help of the cPanel hosting suppliers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is an entirely awry explanation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would distribute the load between different packs of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending various hosting services (electronic mail, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, webspace hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is simply a variety of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given companies offer a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is appropriate if you want to share an enormous number of pics with mates or associates since the service is mostly free of cost. You will receive a randomly generated link for each image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for web sites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to tackling your e-mail box accounts. Some distributors provide web space hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail hosting service. If you would like to keep an email address with your domain name but do not want to keep a website, then the email hosting solution is what you want. You can set up e-mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video file in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video brings about a specific amount of central processing unit load, so with a couple of video clips and several hundred site viewers, you may have a problem with your web space hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will allow you to have as many videos as you would like without worrying about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to own a site. To some degree, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting groups since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can keep databases and email address accounts, upload video files, and so on. At NTC Hosting, for example, you can have a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts that allow you to have all of the aforementioned services in one location. There may be limitations depending on the type of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web page hosting package may be better or worse in comparison with the customary e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are tailored for specific content exclusively.