Classes of hosting solutions

A hosting solution implies depositing and/or sharing certain content on a web server handled by a web hosting vendor. There are different types of hosting services utilized for various purposes, so let's study these. Doing so, you can choose what you need, based on whether you desire to establish a blog, email addresses, or to share files with comrades and acquaintances.

- File hosting: a service delivered by particular companies, which allows you to share bulky files. These could be disk images, motion pictures, audio files, archived files, etc. This solution is also known as file storage, and its only goal is to share files, since it does not support site uploading. As soon as the files are uploaded, you will either receive an accidentally generated download link for each of them, or you will be able to read a roster of all the files in a directory, but you will be unable to open .html or .php website files in your browser. Free-of-cost file storage accounts are often supported by showing advertisements next to the download links, while a timer makes you await a given span of time to observe them. A single file can be downloaded with limited speed. If you run a paid file storage package, there are no limits as to how many files you can upload/download straight away, and also there is no limit in regard to the download speed or the file size.

At the moment, with the assistance of the cPanel hosting companies, "file hosting" is being renamed to the more stylish "cloud hosting". This is a thoroughly amiss explanation of the literal meaning of "cloud hosting". An actual cloud website hosting platform would allocate the tasks at hand between separate sets of hosting servers in a cluster, which are committed to serving different webspace hosting services (email, storage space, statistics, DNS, databases, site hosting CP, etc.) So, the file hosting solution is just a type of a data storage hosting service, not a cloud hosting one. It's not even near.

- Image hosting: close to file hosting; given suppliers offer a hosting solution for pictures solely. This hosting type is suitable if you desire to share a great number of pictures with chums or associates since the service is usually free. You will get a random link for every image or album and you can then share this link. As with the file storage solution, .html and .php files are not supported, so the solution cannot be used for web sites.

- Email hosting: a solution devoted to administering your email box accounts. Some suppliers offer web site hosting solutions for web sites, but do not supply an e-mail hosting service. If you would like to have a mail address with your domain name but do not desire to run a site, then the email hosting solution is what you require. You can set up e-mail accounts and administer them, but there will be no web solution for the domains. The e-mail hosting solution includes incoming POP/IMAP and outgoing SMTP e-mail servers.

- Video hosting: this solution permits you to upload and share video clips. You can either share a link to a certain video, or you can embed the video in your web page that is hosted elsewhere. The benefit of availing of this method in lieu of uploading the video file in a hosting account is that the video produces a particular amount of CPU load, so with a bunch of videos and several hundred web site visitors, you may have a hard time with your web page hosting supplies. Embedding the video file will enable you to utilize as many videos as you wish without bothering about system resources.

- Web page hosting: this is the solution that you require if you desire to run a site. To a certain extent, it involves all of the abovementioned hosting types since, along with your web sites, you can also host pictures and files, you can set up databases and e-mail addresses, upload videos, etc. At Zona Informatica, for instance, you can observe web hosting and dedicated web server hosting packages that enable you to get all of the aforementioned services in one place. There may be limits based on the type of hosting service that you've settled on - a free hosting plan, a paid shared hosting plan, a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on that, your site hosting package may be better or worse juxtaposed to the conventional e-mail/file/video/image hosting plans that are planned for particular content exclusively.