Forms of hosting solutions

A hosting service concerns saving and/or sharing particular web content on a server administered by a web hosting vendor. There are various groups of hosting services utilized for different ends, so let's have a look at them. In this way, you can pick what you want, depending on whether you'd like to set up a web page, mails, or to share files with mates and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution delivered by given file storage providers, which allows you to share huge files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archives, and so on. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole purpose is to share files, since it does not offer web page uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either receive a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to examine a register of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php website files in your browser. Free file storage packages are often supported by displaying ads next to the download links, while a timer forces you to await a given period of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage package, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting firms, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a completely unsuitable explanation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would allocate the tasks at hand between separate packs of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving various web hosting services (email, disk storage, stats, DNS, databases, web site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is simply a type of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: similar to file hosting; some companies offer a hosting solution for pictures only. This hosting kind is suitable if you would like to share a big quantity of pictures with mates or associates since the solution is typically free of cost. You will receive a randomly generated link for each image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for sites.

- Email hosting: a service devoted to handling your mail addresses. Some providers provide webspace hosting solutions for web sites, but do not provide an email hosting service. If you desire to create an e-mail address with your domain name but do not want to have a website, then the e-mail hosting service is what you need. You can open email box accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The email hosting service includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The benefit of using this approach instead of uploading the video clip in a hosting account is that the video file generates a certain amount of CPU load, so with several videos and several hundred website visitors, you may have difficulty with your web page hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will enable you to have as many video files as you want without hassling about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you would like to own a web site. To some degree, it contains all of the aforementioned hosting groups since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can set up databases and e-mail accounts, upload video files, etc. At aBitHosting, for example, you can take a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated server hosting packages that enable you to have all of the aforementioned solutions in one location. There may be restrictions depending on the sort of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web space hosting plan may be better or worse compared with the customary email/file/video/image hosting plans that are created for particular content exclusively.