Classes of hosting services

A hosting service is associated with storing and/or sharing certain web content on a server hosted by a website hosting distributor. There are different sorts of hosting services utilized for various goals, so let's take a peek at these. In this way, you can decide what you want, based on whether you'd like to set up a web site, email box accounts, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service made available by some companies, which permits you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, films, audio files, archives, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole function is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to view .html or .php web page files in your web browser. Free-of-cost file hosting accounts are often supported by displaying adverts beside the download links, while a timer forces you to await a certain amount of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you buy a paid file storage account, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no restriction as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

Nowadays, with the help of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more fashionable "cloud hosting". This is a totally distorted explanation of the actual denotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting environment would split the tasks at hand between separate sets of servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving different website hosting services (mail, web space, statistics, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is simply a sort of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; given providers provide a hosting solution for pictures solely. This hosting variant is suitable if you wish to share a great number of pictures with mates or partners since the solution is generally free. You will obtain a random link for each image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web pages.

- E-mail hosting: a service committed to handling your mails. Some firms provide web hosting services for sites, but do not provide an e-mail hosting service. If you wish to get an e-mail address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a site, then the email hosting solution is what you need. You can create email box accounts and administer them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting service involves incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video clip in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of utilizing this approach in lieu of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a few videos and a few hundred visitors, you may have difficulty with your site hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to keep as many video clips as you desire without worrying about system quotas.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you want to own a website. To a certain extent, it includes all of the aforesaid hosting forms since, along with your sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and e-mails, upload video clips, and so on. At SynNetHost, for instance, you can explore web hosting and dedicated web server hosting accounts that allow you to get all of the aforesaid services in a single location. There may be limitations based on the kind of hosting solution that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting package, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your site hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the normal e-mail/file/video/image hosting accounts that are conceived for specific content only.