Embarking on your web hosting journey can feel like learning a new language. You’re presented with a dictionary of acronyms and technical terms, from DNS to FTP, that can be confusing. This glossary simplifies that jargon, making it easier for you to understand what you’re buying and how to manage your website.
- Add-on Domain: A feature that lets you host a second, completely separate website on the same hosting account. It’s an efficient way to manage multiple sites from one place.
- Apache: A popular, free, and open-source software that acts as a web server. It’s the “waiter” for your website, serving up your pages to visitors’ browsers when they ask for them.
- Bandwidth: Not your internet speed! In web hosting, this refers to the total amount of data that can be transferred from your website to your visitors over a period, usually a month. If your website has lots of images or videos, it will use up more bandwidth.
- Backups: Copies of your website’s files and database. Regular backups are crucial for data protection, allowing you to restore your site if something goes wrong, like a hack or a software update gone bad.
- cPanel: A common and user-friendly control panel that gives you a graphical interface to manage your hosting account. It’s where you can create email accounts, manage files, and install software like WordPress.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network): A network of servers around the globe that stores copies of your website’s static content (like images and videos). When a visitor accesses your site, the CDN delivers the content from the server closest to them, making your site load faster.
- CMS (Content Management System): Software that helps you create and manage your website without needing to code. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are all popular examples of a CMS.
- Cloud Hosting: A flexible hosting service that uses a network of interconnected servers instead of just one. This allows your website to draw resources from multiple servers, making it highly reliable and able to handle sudden traffic spikes.
- Database: An organized collection of data. Most modern websites, especially those built with a CMS, rely on a database to store and organize content like blog posts, comments, and user information.
- Dedicated Hosting: A hosting plan where you rent an entire physical server for your exclusive use. It offers maximum performance, control, and security, making it ideal for large, high-traffic websites.
- Domain Name: Your website’s unique address on the internet, like
tremhost.com. It’s a memorable, human-readable name that points to your website’s IP address. - DNS (Domain Name System): The internet’s “phonebook.” It translates your easy-to-remember domain name (e.g.,
google.com) into a machine-readable IP address (e.g.,142.250.184.196), so browsers know where to find your website. - FTP (File Transfer Protocol): A standard method used to transfer files from your local computer to your web server. It’s a common way for developers to upload website files.
- IP Address: A unique numerical label assigned to every device on a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. Your website’s IP address is how a web server is located on the internet.
- Nameservers: The DNS servers that your domain name points to. They tell the internet where to find your website’s hosting account.
- Root Access: A term for having complete administrative control over your server. It’s typically available with VPS and dedicated hosting plans and allows you to install and configure any software you want.
- SSL Certificate: A digital certificate that encrypts the data transferred between a web server and a user’s browser, ensuring a secure connection. It’s what makes a website use
https://instead ofhttp://and shows a padlock icon in the browser address bar. An SSL is now considered a must-have for all websites. - Shared Hosting: The most common and affordable type of hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares server space and resources (like CPU and RAM) with many other websites. It’s great for beginners and small websites.
- Uptime: The amount of time your website is online and accessible to visitors. It’s usually measured as a percentage, with most providers guaranteeing 99.9% uptime or better.
- VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server): A step up from shared hosting. It uses virtualization to divide a single physical server into multiple isolated virtual servers. Each VPS gets a dedicated portion of resources, offering better performance and more control than shared hosting, at a more affordable price than a dedicated server.
