Categories of hosting services

A hosting solution entails saving and/or sharing certain web content on a hosting server managed by a website hosting supplier. There are different classes of hosting services utilized for different ends, so let's take a peek at them. In that way, you can elect what you want, on the basis of whether you wish to own a blog, mail addresses, or to share files with buddies and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service supplied by some web hosts, which allows you to share big files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only purpose is to share files, since it does not support web site 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 be unable to view .html or .php web files in your browser. Free file storage accounts frequently involve adverts next to the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a certain period of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you get a paid file hosting plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download instantly, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

Now, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is a completely erroneous interpretation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would assign the workload between separate packs of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving miscellaneous webspace hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, webspace hosting Control Panel, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a kind of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: akin to file hosting; given distributors provide a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting brand is good if you wish to share a large number of pictures with mates or acquaintances since the solution is mostly free of cost. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to administering your e-mail address accounts. Some firms offer web hosting solutions for web sites, but do not provide an e-mail hosting solution. If you wish to have 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 need. You can create e-mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video clip creates a certain amount of CPU load, so with a couple of video files and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have a hard time with your hosting quotas. Embedding the video will allow you to keep as many video files as you would like without worrying about system resources.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you require if you want to keep a website. To a certain degree, it involves all of the aforesaid hosting kinds since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can keep databases and mailbox accounts, upload video files, etc. At Lonex, for instance, you can have a look at web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that enable you to get all of the aforesaid solutions in one single location. There may be restrictions based on the kind of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting package may be better or worse compared to the conventional email/file/video/image hosting packages that are planned for specific web content exclusively.