Groups of hosting services

A hosting service appertains to depositing and/or sharing certain content on a web server run by a website hosting company. There are various categories of hosting services utilized for different goals, so let's have a look at these. Thus, you can choose what you need, based on whether you'd like to create a blog, mailbox accounts, or to share files with mates and partners.

- File hosting: a solution distributed by given hosts, which permits you to share enormous files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived documents, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its sole designation is to share files, since it does not support 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 see a record of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web site files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage plans frequently include adverts by the download links, while a timer obliges you to wait for a particular stretch of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you run a paid file storage account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no restriction with regard to the download speed or the file size.

Nowadays, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting distributors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly twisted interpretation of the real meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would divide the load between different bunches of web servers in a cluster, which are devoted to serving various web space hosting services (mail, web space, stats, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is only a kind of a disk storage hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; certain providers provide a hosting service for pictures exclusively. This hosting type is suitable if you want to share an immense amount of pics with friends or colleagues since the solution is usually free. You will receive a randomly generated link for every image or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web pages.

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

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a given video file, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of utilizing this method instead of uploading the video in a hosting account is that the video clip brings about a given amount of CPU load, so with a few video files and several hundred web site viewers, you may have difficulty with your web hosting quotas. Embedding the video will enable you to possess as many video clips as you want to without bothering about system quotas.

- Web page hosting: this is the service that you require if you would like to possess a website. To some degree, it embodies all of the aforementioned hosting varieties since, along with your web sites, you can also host images and files, you can run databases and email address accounts, upload videos, and so on. At Smartest Media, for instance, you can explore web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that permit you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in one single location. There may be limits based on the form of hosting service that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web space hosting account may be better or worse in comparison with the ordinary e-mail/file/video/image hosting packages that are created for particular web content solely.