Classes of hosting services

A hosting service entails depositing and/or sharing given web content on a web hosting server handled by a hosting distributor. There are various groups of hosting services utilized for various goals, so let's take a look at them. In that way, you can determine what you need, based on whether you wish to own a web portal, e-mail box accounts, or to share files with comrades and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service delivered by various companies, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only goal is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to view an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file storage packages are often supported by displaying ads next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to await a specific span of time to perceive them. A single 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 straight away, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchandisers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely inapt interpretation of the real definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would split the tasks at hand between separate sets of web servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different web space hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, web space hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is only a brand of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; specific suppliers offer a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting brand is appropriate if you would like to share a huge quantity of pictures with mates or acquaintances since the solution is generally free of cost. You will receive a randomly generated link for each image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to administering your mail address accounts. Some providers offer webspace hosting services for sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting solution. If you would like to create a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to possess a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you need. You can set up e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video file, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of using this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video file produces a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of videos and several hundred site viewers, you may have difficulty with your hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will enable you to operate as many video files as you desire without bothering about system quotas.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you require if you desire to own a web site. To a certain degree, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting forms since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can keep databases and mail address accounts, upload video clips, etc. At Hosting River, for example, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that permit you to have all of the aforementioned solutions in one single location. There may be restrictions depending on the type of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are planned for particular web content only.