The Web Hosting Glossary
It’s quite a known fact that when building a website one also needs web-hosting. Hosting is what your website MUST HAVE in order to become public for everyone to click on and browse through, whether it’s a blog, a portfolio, an enterprise or a small online store. In order to know which hosting site to choose and understand the package options it offers, you should begin with studying the basic web hosting glossary and knowing what stands behind each and every term. It may seem like reading Chinese at first, especially for those who are dipping their feet in the website building & hosting world for the first time, however it’s quite comprehended on a basic level at the very least.
Here are the main web hosting terms you need to know to get started.
.htaccess
A type of file through which the parameters determining the access to a particular file are set.
Add-on Domain
A domain name for a distinct website which shares the web hosting resources with your primary one.
Bandwidth
The amount of data transfer your web hosting account includes, for instance, when a visitor loads your pages, or when you send or receive emails using your hosting account.
Blog
Is a discussion or informational site consisting of post entries. They are mainly the work of individuals and often cover a single subject.
CMS
Short for Content Management System – a user-friendly interface through which you can create and edit your website’s pages.
Control Panel
The web hosting interface that allows you to manage your website settings, upload files and install applications.
cPanel
A commonly used type of Control Panel.
Dedicated Hosting
A type of hosting plan that allows you to use all the resources of a server without sharing it with other account holders/websites.
Dedicated IP
A dedicated hosting feature that allows your websites to have a unique IP address.
Disk Space
The amount of server space you can use to store website files and emails.
Domain Name
Is an identification string of characters registered in the DNS (Domain Name System) and used to identify a specific website.
Error Pages
The page displayed when one of your website’s visitors stumbles upon an unavailable resource or accesses an incorrect URL.
FTP
Short for File Transfer Protocol – one of the commonly used methods of uploading, downloading, and sharing files.
HTML
Short for Hyper Text Markup Language – a standardized system used to tag text files for web design purposes.
HTTP
Short for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol – the protocol used to access HTML files stored on a web server via the Internet.
IP
Short for Internet Protocol – a unique numerical code identifying each device connected within a network.
Linux Server
A web server using Linux as operating system
MySQL
A database system used by various website applications that is often included by the web hosting plan
Parked Domain
A secondary domain name that points to the same website and uses the same hosting account.
Server
The computer on which all files are stored in order to be available across the Internet.
Shared Hosting
A type of web hosting plan that allows you to use the resources of a server together with other account holders/websites.
SSL
Short for Secure Sockets Layer, a security protocol developed by Netscape to ensure the protection of financial information such as credit card numbers that e-commerce websites need to process their transactions. SSL protected web pages are marked as ‘https’.
Uptime
The period of time during which your server functions allowing your website to work uninterrupted.
VPS Hosting
Short for Virtual Private Server – a partitioned server, whose partitions act as an independent server.
Web Hosting
An internet based service that consists of providing storage space for websites files and applications.
Windows Server
A web server using Windows as operating system.