Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting service means storing and/or sharing certain web content on a web server run by a web hosting provider. There are various categories of hosting services utilized for different purposes, so let's have a look at these. In that way, you can elect what you want, depending on whether you wish to set up a web portal, emails, or to share files with mates and partners.

- File hosting: a solution supplied by various file storage providers, which lets you share large files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its single purpose is to share files, since it does not support web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free-of-charge file storage packages are often supported by exhibiting advertisements by the download links, while a timer makes you await a particular period of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you own a paid file hosting plan, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Now, with the help of the cPanel hosting traders, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more faddish "cloud hosting". This is a completely twisted interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allot the workload between different hosts of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving miscellaneous web page hosting services (electronic mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is merely a variety of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; some corporations provide a hosting service for images exclusively. This hosting type is suitable if you would like to share a big amount of pictures with pals or partners since the solution is mostly free. You will get a random link for each pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to taking care of your e-mails. Some corporations offer hosting solutions for sites, but do not provide an e-mail hosting service. If you want to keep an email address with your domain name but do not desire to keep a website, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can open email mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The email hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a particular video file, or you can embed the video file in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of availing of this method instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video file brings about a certain amount of CPU load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred site viewers, you may have a problem with your webspace hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will permit you to own as many videos as you want without bothering about system reserves.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you want to own a site. To a certain degree, it embodies all of the aforesaid hosting brands since, along with your web sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and e-mail address accounts, upload videos, etc. At IcaHost.com, for instance, you can examine web hosting and dedicated web hosting plans that permit you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in a single location. There may be limits based on the type of hosting solution that you've chosen - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting account may be better or worse compared with the conventional email/file/video/image hosting plans that are tailored for specific web content solely.