Categories of hosting solutions

A hosting solution is associated with stockpiling and/or sharing given web content on a web hosting server hosted by a hosting company. There are different sorts of hosting services utilized for various purposes, so let's have a peek at these. In this way, you can choose what you want, depending on whether you desire to run a website, mails, or to share files with buddies and partners.

- File hosting: a service furnished by certain web hosts, which permits you to share immense files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This service is also known as file storage, and its sole goal is to share files, since it does not support website uploading. Once the files are uploaded, you will either get an accidentally created download link for each of them, or you will be able to see a roll of all the files in a directory, but you will not be able to load .html or .php web files in your web browser. Free file storage solutions are often supported by showing advertisements 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 restricted speed. If you have a paid file storage plan, there are no limitations as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit as far as the download speed and the file size are concerned.

These days, with the help of the cPanel hosting wholesalers, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more voguish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly inappropriate interpretation of the actual definition of "cloud hosting". A real cloud website hosting environment would distribute the workload between separate hosts of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to attending different web space hosting services (mail, disk space, stats, DNS, databases, website hosting CP, and so on.) So, the file hosting solution is just a sort of a disk space hosting solution, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even close.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given companies provide a hosting service for pictures only. This hosting type is suitable if you want to share a big quantity of images with buddies or associates since the solution is mostly free of charge. You will obtain a randomly generated link for each picture or album and you can subsequently share this link. As with the file hosting service, .html and .php files are not supported, so the service cannot be used for web pages.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to managing your e-mail accounts. Some vendors provide site hosting solutions for websites, but do not supply an email hosting service. If you desire to create an email address with your domain name but do not desire to run a site, then the email hosting service is what you need. You can open electronic mail accounts and manage them, but there will be no hosting service for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP email servers.

- Video hosting: this service allows you to upload and share video files. You can either share a link to some video clip, or you can embed the video in your site that is hosted elsewhere. The advantage of using this approach instead of uploading the video in a web hosting account is that the video clip creates a certain amount of CPU load, so with a handful of video clips and a few hundred site visitors, you may have difficulty with your web hosting quotas. Embedding the video file will permit you to possess as many video files as you would like without worrying about system resources.

- Web hosting: this is the solution that you need if you want to own a site. To some degree, it embodies all of the abovementioned hosting forms since, along with your web pages, you can also host images and files, you can set up databases and mailbox accounts, upload video files, etc. At Yellowknife Hosting, for example, you can take a glimpse at web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages that permit you to get all of the aforementioned solutions in a single location. There may be restrictions based on the type of hosting solution that you've opted for - a free hosting account, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your hosting plan may be better or worse compared to the conventional email/file/video/image hosting accounts that are devised for specific content solely.