Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting service means storing and/or sharing certain web content on a hosting server handled by a website hosting distributor. There are various types of hosting services used for different goals, so let's have a gaze at them. Doing so, you can choose what you need, on the basis of whether you'd like to run a web portal, emails, or to share files with pals and associates.

- File hosting: a solution made available by certain vendors, which enables you to share large files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its only function is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore an inventory of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free file storage solutions are frequently supported by exhibiting ads beside the download links, while a timer makes you await a specific spell of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file hosting package, 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 the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchants, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more trendy "cloud hosting". This is a completely inappropriate explanation of the actual meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would allocate the workload between separate hosts of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to attending different site hosting services (mail, disk space, statistics, DNS, databases, CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is merely a sort of a storage space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; specific suppliers offer a hosting service for images only. This hosting brand is good if you wish to share a vast amount of images with pals or associates since the service is commonly free of cost. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every pic or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for sites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to taking care of your mail accounts. Some vendors offer web page hosting services for web sites, but do not offer an e-mail hosting solution. If you want to set up an e-mail address with your domain name but do not wish to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can open email address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video, or you can embed the video in your web site that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this approach instead of uploading the video file in a web hosting account is that the video file generates a specific amount of CPU load, so with several videos and several hundred viewers, you may have trouble with your web site hosting quotas. Embedding the video will allow you to manage as many video clips as you would like without worrying about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the service that you need if you desire to possess a website. To a certain degree, it embodies all of the abovementioned hosting types since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can keep databases and email aliases, upload video files, etc. At XL Technologies, for example, you can explore web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that allow you to have all of the aforementioned services in one location. There may be limitations depending on the type of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web hosting account may be better or worse juxtaposed to the routine email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for particular content solely.