Categories of hosting services

A hosting service refers to hoarding and/or sharing given web content on a server administered by a web hosting vendor. There are various groups of hosting services utilized for different aims, so let's have a glimpse at these. In that way, you can determine what you need, depending on whether you wish to establish a web page, e-mails, or to share files with mates and associates.

- File hosting: a service provided by some file storage providers, which permits you to share immense files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole objective is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage services are often supported by showing adverts next to the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a specific span of time to see them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you purchase a paid file storage account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally inapt interpretation of the real connotation of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would distribute the workload between autonomous stacks of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous hosting services (electronic mail, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, web page hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a variety of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; some suppliers provide a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting type is suitable if you would like to share a huge quantity of images with mates or acquaintances since the service is generally free. You will obtain a randomly generated link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for websites.

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

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a given video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video clip creates a given amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video files and several hundred website viewers, you may have a problem with your hosting quotas. Embedding the video will permit you to manage as many video clips as you wish without worrying about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to run a website. To a certain degree, it involves all of the aforesaid hosting kinds since, along with your websites, you can also host pics and files, you can create databases and e-mail address accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At JDC Hosting, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web hosting services that allow you to get all of the abovementioned services in one single location. There may be limitations depending on the form of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting package may be better or worse compared with the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are meant for particular web content solely.