Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service pertains to keeping and/or sharing certain web content on a web server run by a website hosting vendor. There are different kinds of hosting services used for different goals, so let's have a peek at these. Thus, you can decide what you want, depending on whether you desire to build a web site, emails, or to share files with buddies and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service supplied by certain firms, which lets you share large files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its only designation is to share files, since it does not offer site 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 survey an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting accounts are often supported by exhibiting advertisements beside the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a given period of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you have a paid file storage package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a totally imprecise explanation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would allocate the load between different packs of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different web site hosting services (electronic mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, webspace hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is only a kind of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some companies offer a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you desire to share a large quantity of pictures with friends or associates since the solution is usually free of charge. You will receive a randomly generated link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to administering your mail aliases. Some suppliers provide web hosting services for sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you wish to run an e-mail address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a website, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can set up mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of utilizing this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video file produces a given amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video clips and a few hundred viewers, you may have a hard time with your web space hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will allow you to keep as many video clips as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to have a website. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can create databases and e-mail accounts, upload videos, etc. At Inspireweb, for instance, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated server hosting solutions that allow you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in one single place. There may be restrictions based on the form of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your webspace hosting plan may be better or worse in comparison with the usual email/file/video/image hosting packages that are tailored for specific web content only.