Groups of hosting services

A hosting service is associated with stockpiling and/or sharing given content on a server run by a hosting company. There are different categories of hosting services used for different purposes, so let's study these. In this way, you can decide what you want, on the basis of whether you wish to run a blog, e-mailbox accounts, or to share files with friends and colleagues.

- File hosting: a solution offered by some providers, which permits you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, movies, audio files, archives, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its only goal is to share files, since it does not offer site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to explore a record of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web page files in your browser. Free file storage packages are often supported by showing ads next to the download links, while a timer compels you to await a given period of time to observe them. A given file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you purchase a paid file hosting account, there are no restrictions as to how many files you can upload/download right away, and also there is no limitation when it comes to the download speed or the file size.

At present, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting vendors, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more modern "cloud hosting". This is a totally wrong explanation of the actual connotation of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting system would split the load between autonomous stacks of web servers in a cluster, which are dedicated to serving different web hosting services (electronic mail, data storage, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting service is simply a sort of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: resembling file hosting; some suppliers offer a hosting solution for pictures exclusively. This hosting variant is suitable if you wish to share a vast amount of pictures with friends or acquaintances since the service is generally free of cost. You will obtain a random link for every pic or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not compatible, so the service cannot be used for websites.

- Email hosting: a service dedicated to managing your email aliases. Some firms provide hosting solutions for web sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you wish to own an e-mail address with your domain name but do not desire to possess a site, then the e-mail hosting service is what you require. You can create mail address accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP mail servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video file, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted somewhere else. The advantage of using this method in lieu of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video brings about a certain amount of central processing unit load, so with a handful of video files and a few hundred web page viewers, you may have a hard time with your web site hosting reserves. Embedding the video clip will enable you to operate as many video files as you would like without bothering about system resources.

- Website hosting: this is the solution that you need if you would like to possess a web site. To some extent, it consists of all of the aforementioned hosting variants since, along with your web sites, you can also host pics and files, you can run databases and mail accounts, upload video files, etc. At HJ Management, for example, you can take a look at web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that allow you to have all of the aforementioned solutions in one location. There may be limitations depending on the type of hosting solution that you've selected - a free hosting package, a paid shared hosting account, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your web site hosting package may be better or worse compared with the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are tailored for particular web content only.