Forms of hosting solutions
A hosting solution concerns stockpiling and/or sharing particular web content on a web hosting server hosted by a web hosting company. There are different categories of hosting services used for different ends, so let's have a peek at these. Doing so, you can conclude what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to run a website, email box accounts, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.
- File hosting: a service provided by given companies, which permits you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only aim is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a table of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage solutions frequently involve advertisements next to the download links, while a timer compels you to wait for a given interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.
At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a completely false explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would allot the load between individual stacks of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending miscellaneous hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, web space hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is just a sort of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.
- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some distributors offer a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting brand is appropriate if you desire to share a large quantity of images with friends or partners since the solution is commonly free. You will receive 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 solution cannot be used for web pages.
- Email hosting: a service devoted to administering your email box accounts. Some providers provide web page hosting services for websites, but do not offer an email service. If you would like to launch a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open email accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes 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 some video clip, or you can embed the video clip in your website that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this method instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a certain amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video clips and a few hundred web site visitors, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will enable you to keep as many videos as you wish without bothering about system resources.
- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you need if you wish to have a web site. To some degree, it includes all of the abovementioned hosting variants since, along with your websites, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and email accounts, upload video files, and so on. At A3HOSTING.NET, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated web hosting solutions that enable you to have all of the aforementioned solutions in one location. There may be restrictions depending on the type of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the routine email/file/video/image hosting packages that are intended for specific web content solely.