Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service concerns depositing and/or sharing given web content on a web hosting server administered by a website hosting company. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's have a gaze at these. In that way, you can decide what you want, depending on whether you desire to run a blog, email box accounts, or to share files with chums and partners.

- File hosting: a solution offered by various firms, which enables you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole purpose is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either obtain an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to see an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting accounts often involve advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a certain interval of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you have a paid file storage plan, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly distorted explanation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would share the load between individual hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different web hosting services (mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a brand of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some firms offer a hosting solution for images only. This hosting type is suitable if you wish to share a big amount of pictures with mates or acquaintances since the solution is generally free. You will obtain a random 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 supported, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution dedicated to handling your emails. Some suppliers provide hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail service. If you desire to launch an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to run a website, then the e-mail hosting service is what you require. You can open e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a certain video file, or you can embed the video file in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video brings about a specific amount of central processing unit load, so with several videos and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have difficulty with your web site hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will permit you to possess as many videos as you wish without hassling about system resources.

- Web site hosting: this is the service that you need if you wish to possess a website. To a certain degree, it contains all of the aforesaid hosting categories since, along with your websites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and emails, upload video clips, and so on. At islahost, for instance, you can see web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that enable you to get all of the abovementioned solutions in one single location. There may be restrictions depending on the kind of hosting solution that you've picked - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are designed for particular content only.