Varieties of hosting services

A hosting service entails keeping and/or sharing certain web content on a web server managed by a hosting distributor. There are various types of hosting services used for different ends, so let's take a glimpse at them. In that way, you can elect what you need, depending on whether you desire to set up a web site, e-mail addresses, or to share files with pals and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service delivered by certain firms, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole aim is to share files, since it does not support web 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 explore an index of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free file hosting solutions are often supported by exhibiting advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a particular amount of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you possess a paid file storage package, there are no restrictions 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.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modish "cloud hosting". This is an entirely wrong explanation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would assign the tasks at hand between individual hosts of servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending different site hosting services (email, storage space, stats, DNS, databases, web site hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is merely a brand of a data storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some providers offer a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is good if you wish to share a great number of pics with mates or partners since the service is mostly free. You will receive a random link for every picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service devoted to managing your mailbox accounts. Some suppliers offer web site hosting services for websites, but do not supply an email hosting service. If you wish to keep a mail address with your domain name but do not wish to own a website, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can set up e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this method in lieu of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video clip produces a specific amount of central processing unit load, so with a few video clips and several hundred site viewers, you may have difficulty with your hosting reserves. Embedding the video file will enable you to use as many video clips as you wish without bothering about system resources.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you require if you wish to have a site. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting types since, along with your sites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and e-mails, upload video files, and so on. At BLUE RIBBON HOSTING, for instance, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web hosting solutions that enable you to get all of the aforementioned services in one place. There may be limits based on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your website hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the standard e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for particular content exclusively.