Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service appertains to keeping and/or sharing certain web content on a web server administered by a hosting company. There are various forms of hosting services used for various aims, so let's examine these. Doing so, you can elect what you need, depending on whether you wish to launch a site, mail accounts, or to share files with chums and colleagues.

- File hosting: a service distributed by various providers, which permits you to share huge files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only goal is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally created 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 be unable to load .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free file storage plans frequently include advertisements next to the download links, while a timer forces you to wait for a specific spell of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you buy a paid file storage plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting providers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a totally incorrect explanation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would allocate the tasks at hand between different groups of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various web space hosting services (mail, web space, stats, DNS, databases, CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a type of a disk space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; given distributors provide a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share a great number of pictures with buddies or associates since the solution is mostly free of charge. You will obtain a random link for each pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for websites.

- Email hosting: a service committed to managing your e-mail address accounts. Some companies offer website hosting solutions for web pages, but do not offer an e-mail hosting service. If you would like to run an email address with your domain name but do not desire to run a site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can set up email box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a particular video clip, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this method instead of uploading the video clip in a web hosting account is that the video produces a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video files and a few hundred web site visitors, you may have a hard time with your web hosting resources. Embedding the video will enable you to use as many video clips as you wish without bothering about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to possess a site. To a certain degree, it encompasses all of the aforesaid hosting variants since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can keep databases and e-mail address accounts, upload video clips, and so on. At Lonex, for instance, you can take a gaze at web hosting and dedicated server hosting packages that permit you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in a single place. There may be limits based on the type of hosting service that you've opted for - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the regular e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are planned for specific web content exclusively.