Varieties of hosting services

A hosting solution concerns stockpiling and/or sharing specific content on a web server managed by a web hosting vendor. There are different categories of hosting services utilized for various goals, so let's take a glimpse at them. In that way, you can determine what you need, based on whether you wish to set up a web page, e-mail aliases, or to share files with friends and associates.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by particular web hosts, which enables you to share big files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single goal is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to open .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file hosting solutions are often supported by showing adverts beside the download links, while a timer makes you await a specific span of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file hosting account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

At present, with the help of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a totally distorted interpretation of the real denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allot the tasks at hand between separate hosts of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving various web site hosting services (mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is just a kind of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given companies provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting variant is good if you would like to share a large number of pics with pals or partners since the service is commonly free of cost. You will receive a randomly generated link for every 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 utilized for sites.

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

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to a specific video, or you can embed the video clip in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this method instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video clip generates a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video clips and several hundred web site viewers, you may have a problem with your web page hosting quotas. Embedding the video will enable you to possess as many video files as you wish without hassling about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to run a web site. To some extent, it embodies all of the aforesaid hosting variants since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and mail aliases, upload videos, etc. At NTC Hosting, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages that allow you to have all of the aforementioned services in a single location. There may be restrictions based on the type of hosting solution that you've picked - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting package may be better or worse in comparison with the ordinary email/file/video/image hosting plans that are made for particular content only.