Groups of hosting services

A hosting service concerns saving and/or sharing given web content on a hosting server run by a website hosting distributor. There are various kinds of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's have a peek at them. Thus, you can elect what you need, depending on whether you desire to run a weblog, email addresses, or to share files with chums and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service furnished by certain vendors, which permits you to share large files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole function is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a list of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting solutions are frequently supported by showing adverts by the download links, while a timer compels you to await a particular interval of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you possess a paid file hosting plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a totally untrue interpretation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would allot the load between autonomous stacks of servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving miscellaneous website hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is only a brand of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; certain providers provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting kind is appropriate if you want to share a vast number of pictures with comrades or partners since the service is typically free. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each 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 service cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution dedicated to tackling your e-mailbox accounts. Some distributors provide hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail service. If you wish to have an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to own a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can create email accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a given video, or you can embed the video file in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach in lieu of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video creates a particular amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video files and a few hundred visitors, you may have difficulty with your web site hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will allow you to operate as many video clips as you want to without hassling about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to have a site. To some degree, it encompasses all of the aforesaid hosting kinds since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can have databases and mails, upload videos, and so on. At Lonex, for example, you can have a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated web hosting accounts 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 package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your site hosting package may be better or worse compared with the usual email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are meant for particular web content solely.