Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service concerns depositing and/or sharing particular content on a hosting server handled by a hosting provider. There are various groups of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's survey them. In that way, you can conclude what you want, based on whether you'd like to own a site, mail aliases, or to share files with chums and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service delivered by particular file storage providers, which enables you to share large files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-charge file storage solutions frequently involve advertisements next to the download links, while a timer compels you to await a specific spell of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file hosting package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a totally inappropriate interpretation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would share the tasks at hand between autonomous stacks of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving miscellaneous web site hosting services (electronic mail, web space, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a variety of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; certain distributors provide a hosting solution for pictures solely. This hosting variant is good if you would like to share a big number of pics with buddies or colleagues since the service is typically free. You will receive a random link for each pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for websites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to handling your email aliases. Some vendors provide site hosting services for sites, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you want to manage a mail address with your domain name but do not want to possess a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can open electronic mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video file produces a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a bunch of video files and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have difficulty with your webspace hosting reserves. Embedding the video will enable you to possess as many video files as you wish without bothering about system reserves.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to run a web site. To a certain extent, it comprises all of the aforementioned hosting kinds since, along with your web pages, you can also host pictures and files, you can keep databases and e-mail address accounts, upload video files, etc. At ICT Gurus EA Limited, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting services that allow you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in one place. There may be limitations based on the kind of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your website hosting account may be better or worse compared to the routine e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are created for specific web content only.