Categories of hosting services

A hosting solution is related to keeping and/or sharing particular content on a server run by a website hosting supplier. There are various groups of hosting services used for various aims, so let's examine these. In that way, you can conclude what you want, depending on whether you desire to create a web site, electronic mail accounts, or to share files with mates and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution made available by some file storage providers, which permits you to share large files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its single function is to share files, since it does not offer web site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to load .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file storage packages frequently involve ads next to the download links, while a timer makes you wait for a given span of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no limit in regard to the download speed or the file size.

These days, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is an entirely wrong explanation of the literal definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would split the load between separate groups of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different website hosting services (mail, disk storage, statistics, DNS, databases, web site hosting Control Panel, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is just a kind of a disk space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given vendors provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting type is appropriate if you want to share a big number of pics with buddies or partners since the solution is usually free of charge. You will obtain a random 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 compatible, so the service cannot be utilized for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to taking care of your mail aliases. Some distributors offer web page hosting services for sites, but do not supply an e-mail service. If you want to set up an email address with your domain name but do not wish to own a website, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can set up mailbox accounts and administer them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The email hosting service involves 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 certain video clip, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video clip creates a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with several video clips and several hundred web site viewers, you may have trouble with your hosting quotas. Embedding the video clip will enable you to own as many videos as you would like without worrying about system quotas.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to keep a website. To some extent, it embodies all of the aforesaid hosting types since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can have databases and e-mail addresses, upload video files, etc. At AIDA Host, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that enable you to have all of the abovementioned services in one single place. There may be limits depending on the sort of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the common e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are designed for specific content solely.