Types of hosting services

A hosting service entails depositing and/or sharing certain web content on a hosting server handled by a web hosting provider. There are various types of hosting services utilized for different purposes, so let's take a gaze at these. In that way, you can elect what you want, depending on whether you'd like to run a web portal, email address accounts, or to share files with chums and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a solution offered by some providers, which lets you share huge files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only objective is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. The moment the files are uploaded, you will either get a randomly created download link for each of them, or you will be able to survey a list of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php web site files in your web browser. Free file hosting packages are frequently supported by showing advertisements by the download links, while a timer forces you to await a particular span of time to view them. A given file can be downloaded with restricted speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting account, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download at once, and also there is no limitation as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting corporations, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a completely inapt interpretation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting platform would apportion the tasks at hand between different bunches of web hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different hosting services (email, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting service is merely a brand of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: comparable with file hosting; certain firms provide a hosting solution for images only. This hosting kind is suitable if you want to share a large number of pictures with comrades or partners since the service is mostly free. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each and every picture 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 websites.

- E-mail hosting: a solution devoted to administering your email mailbox accounts. Some companies provide webspace hosting services for web sites, but do not provide an email solution. If you want to have an email address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a web site, then the e-mail hosting solution is what you require. You can open e-mail box accounts and manage them, but there will be no web service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share videos. You can either share a link to some video, or you can embed the video in your website that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of availing of this approach instead of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video clip brings about a given amount of central processing unit load, so with a couple of videos and several hundred web page viewers, you may have a hard time with your website hosting resources. Embedding the video will allow you to have as many videos as you wish without bothering about system resources.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you desire to possess a site. To a certain degree, it embodies all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your websites, you can also host pictures and files, you can have databases and e-mail box accounts, upload video files, and so on. At NTC Hosting, for example, you can have a glance at web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages that allow you to have all of the aforesaid solutions in a single place. There may be limitations based on the type of hosting service that you've chosen - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Depending on that, your web site hosting plan may be better or worse juxtaposed to the typical email/file/video/image hosting plans that are tailored for specific web content solely.