Categories of hosting services

A hosting solution means saving and/or sharing specific web content on a hosting server hosted by a web hosting distributor. There are different classes of hosting services used for various aims, so let's review these. Thus, you can pick what you need, depending on whether you wish to establish a blog, emails, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service furnished by particular companies, which permits you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its only aim is to share files, since it does not support web page uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free file storage accounts are often supported by showing ads by the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a particular interval of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you purchase a paid file storage plan, there are no limitations 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.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is an entirely inapt interpretation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allocate the tasks at hand between separate groups of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different webspace hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is only a type of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; certain providers offer a hosting service for images solely. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share a great number of images with chums or acquaintances since the service is commonly free of charge. You will get a random link for each and every picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to managing your mailbox accounts. Some firms offer webspace hosting services for websites, but do not supply an e-mail service. If you wish to get a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to possess a website, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can set up e-mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this method instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a given amount of central processing unit load, so with a bunch of video files and several hundred visitors, you may have a problem with your web space hosting reserves. Embedding the video will enable you to operate as many video files as you would like without worrying about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to keep a web site. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforesaid hosting forms since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and e-mail accounts, upload videos, etc. At Duo Servers, for instance, you can take a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated web hosting services that permit you to get all of the aforesaid services in one single location. There may be limits depending on the type of hosting service that you've picked - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web space hosting package may be better or worse compared with the usual e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are tailored for particular web content only.