Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution suggests stashing and/or sharing particular content on a web server run by a website hosting distributor. There are various varieties of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's explore these. In that way, you can determine what you need, based on whether you wish to create a website, mailbox accounts, or to share files with mates and partners.

- File hosting: a service made available by given vendors, which lets you share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only purpose is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to view .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-charge file storage solutions are often supported by showing ads by the download links, while a timer makes you await a particular amount of time to see them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file storage package, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download immediately, and also there is no restriction in regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchants, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a completely false explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would apportion the load between different packs of servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various site hosting services (mail, web space, stats, DNS, databases, webspace hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a kind of a storage space hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some companies offer a hosting solution for images exclusively. This hosting type is appropriate if you desire to share a big number of pics with friends or associates since the solution is typically free of charge. You will get a randomly generated link for each and every image 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 web pages.

- Email hosting: a solution dedicated to managing your mailbox accounts. Some companies offer webspace hosting services for web sites, but do not provide an e-mail hosting solution. If you desire to keep an email address with your domain name but do not wish to run a web site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you want. You can open e-mailbox accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting solution involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this approach in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video file brings about a certain amount of CPU load, so with several videos and several hundred visitors, you may have a problem with your web hosting supplies. Embedding the video clip will allow you to possess as many video files as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Web site hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to run a website. To a certain extent, it includes all of the aforementioned hosting forms since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and mail address accounts, upload video files, and so on. At NTC Hosting, for example, you can take a gaze at web hosting and dedicated hosting plans that allow you to have all of the aforementioned services in a single place. There may be limits depending on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web page hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are made for specific web content exclusively.