Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution pertains to stockpiling and/or sharing given content on a hosting server handled by a web hosting vendor. There are different types of hosting services used for different ends, so let's review them. Thus, you can conclude what you need, on the basis of whether you wish to run a web page, electronic mail accounts, or to share files with mates and associates.

- File hosting: a solution supplied by some web hosts, which allows you to share large files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole purpose is to share files, since it does not support 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 explore a list of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to see .html or .php website files in your web browser. Free file hosting solutions often include advertisements by the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a particular period of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you own a paid file hosting plan, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Now, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting merchants, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is an entirely incorrect explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting system would divide the workload between different sets of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to attending various website hosting services (email, data storage, statistics, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is only a type of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; specific companies offer a hosting service for images solely. This hosting variant is suitable if you would like to share a vast quantity of pictures with friends or acquaintances since the service is mostly free of charge. You will get a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the solution cannot be utilized for sites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to managing your email addresses. Some corporations provide website hosting services for web pages, but do not offer an email solution. If you desire to set up a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to have a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you want. You can set up e-mail address accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service enables you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to a specific video clip, or you can embed the video file in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video brings about a particular amount of central processing unit load, so with a few video clips and several hundred site visitors, you may have a problem with your hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will permit you to keep as many videos as you wish without hassling about system reserves.

- Website hosting: this is the service that you need if you want to keep a web site. To a certain degree, it encompasses all of the aforesaid hosting sorts since, along with your web sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can keep databases and email mailbox accounts, upload videos, and so on. At ADIN Hosting, for example, you can observe web hosting and dedicated hosting services that enable you to have all of the abovementioned solutions in one single place. There may be restrictions based on the kind of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the common email/file/video/image hosting packages that are devised for specific web content solely.