Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution concerns keeping and/or sharing given content on a web server administered by a website hosting company. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different aims, so let's study them. Doing so, you can determine what you want, on the basis of whether you wish to set up a site, e-mail address accounts, or to share files with pals and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution provided by various web hosts, which permits you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, and so on. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole goal is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to view a register of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to see .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage solutions are frequently supported by displaying adverts by the download links, while a timer makes you await a certain stretch of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you possess a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limit in regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly false interpretation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would assign the load between independent sets of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving miscellaneous web space hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting service is just a variety of a disk storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; specific providers provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting variant is good if you want to share a big quantity of pics with friends or associates since the solution is typically free of cost. You will receive a random link for every picture 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 utilized for web sites.

- Email hosting: a service committed to taking care of your e-mail addresses. Some vendors offer web space hosting solutions for sites, but do not supply an email hosting service. If you wish to open a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to have a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open email accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a certain video clip, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a specific amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of video clips and a few hundred website visitors, you may have trouble with your webspace hosting resources. Embedding the video clip will enable you to possess as many videos as you wish without hassling about system reserves.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you need if you desire to own a website. To some degree, it encompasses all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and mailbox accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At STEERWEB, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting plans 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 selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for specific content solely.