Classes of hosting services

A hosting service refers to storing and/or sharing given content on a web server managed by a website hosting provider. There are different classes of hosting services utilized for different ends, so let's examine these. Thus, you can conclude what you need, depending on whether you desire to establish a web site, email mailbox accounts, or to share files with pals and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution provided by certain hosts, which lets you share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a table of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting plans frequently involve adverts by the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a given amount of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you have a paid file hosting account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limit when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a completely mistaken interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would allot the load between independent sets of web servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving miscellaneous web space hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a type of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; specific vendors offer a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting brand is suitable if you would like to share a great number of pics with chums or associates since the solution is mostly free of charge. You will obtain a randomly generated link for every picture 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 sites.

- Email hosting: a solution committed to taking care of your e-mails. Some providers offer site hosting services for web pages, but do not supply an e-mail hosting solution. If you desire to set up an e-mail address with your domain name but do not desire to have a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you want. You can create e-mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a particular video clip, or you can embed the video file in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing this method instead of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video file produces a given amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video files and a few hundred site viewers, you may have a hard time with your hosting reserves. Embedding the video will permit you to run as many videos as you wish without bothering about system resources.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to own a site. To a certain degree, it contains all of the abovementioned hosting groups since, along with your websites, you can also host images and files, you can keep databases and e-mail address accounts, upload video clips, etc. At PNG Web Hosting, for example, you can have a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated hosting packages that enable you to get all of the aforementioned services in one place. There may be restrictions depending on the form of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the customary e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are intended for specific web content only.