Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution applies to stockpiling and/or sharing specific web content on a web server administered by a hosting company. There are different types of hosting services used for various goals, so let's take a gaze at these. In this way, you can decide what you want, depending on whether you'd like to build a weblog, e-mails, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by certain file storage providers, which allows you to share immense files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated 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 be unable to load .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file storage solutions are often supported by exhibiting adverts next to the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a given period of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At the moment, with the help of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly wrong interpretation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would allocate the workload between autonomous groups of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various hosting services (electronic mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a variety of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; some firms provide a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting variant is suitable if you want to share a huge amount of pics with friends or acquaintances since the service is generally free of charge. You will obtain a random link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a service devoted to administering your mails. Some vendors provide webspace hosting services for web pages, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you desire to keep a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to run a website, then the e-mail hosting service is what you want. You can set up e-mail box accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video clip brings about a specific amount of central processing unit load, so with a bunch of videos and several hundred site visitors, you may have a hard time with your web page hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will allow you to own as many videos as you would like without worrying about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to have a website. To some extent, it involves all of the abovementioned hosting forms since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can have databases and mail address accounts, upload video files, and so on. At Pearl Host, for example, you can take a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that enable you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one single place. There may be limits depending on the sort of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are tailored for particular content solely.