If you’re trying to get a web-based business off the ground, you’re going to have to understand some basic technical terms used when discussing the Internet, web hosting, types of servers, content management systems, and more. Unfortunately for newbies out there, this information can be hard to understand and many web hosting information sites can seem like they are written in a foreign language.
Let’s take a look at the most common web hosting terms and what they actually mean.
Types of Web Hosting
- Web Hosting — Web Hosting refers to the computer that is used to “host” your website. All of the data being sent from the site to computers and collected by customers entering information in will be stored on this computer. These hosts are generally companies that offer a variety of options depending on your needs and price range.
- Cloud Hosting — This is a hosting option where your website is stored “in the cloud” meaning it is actually spread across multiple servers, many times in different locations. This type of hosting allows you to access your site’s data from anywhere.
- Dedicated Hosting — This occurs when your website, and only your website, is hosted on one server that is not shared. As a result, all of the server’s resources go to giving you the fastest speeds possible. As a result of all this speed and power, you will pay the most for this option.
- Reseller Hosting — Reseller Hosting is a type of web hosting service that lets you buy hosting resources from a hosting provider and resell them to your own customers. A reseller acts as a middleman between the hosting provider and the end users.
- Shared Hosting — With this option for hosting, several websites are stored on one computer server. These sites share all resources including bandwidth and processing speed. If one site has a traffic spike, it will slow down the other sites on the server. This is often the cheapest option for web hosting.
- VPS Hosting — Virtual Private Server is the in-between option for dedicated and shared hosting. It means that your shared server is partitioned so that you have your own set of dedicated resources that you don’t have to share with the other sites on the server.
- WordPress Hosting — WordPress Hosting is a server that is specifically optimized for WordPress websites. This provides a better speed and performance for all your visitors. A non-specialized hosting service optimizes its servers for general use and is not specific to a CMS such as WordPress.
Glossary of Hosting Features
- Bandwidth — This refers to the amount of data that is transferred on your server. If your hosting company limits or charges you by the amount of bandwidth used, then this is an important term to know. Your site will use up bandwidth with every piece of text or image viewed by a customer along with anything that they may download.
- CPU — Stands for Central Processing Unit. This is the processing power behind your server. If a server has a newer, faster CPU, then you can access your site quicker and it will load faster for customers.
- Dedicated IP — A dedicated IP address is a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address solely for your websites and hosting account. Dedicated IPs are required if you plan to securely accept credit card sales with an SSL certificate.
- Domain Name — A domain name is the letters and numbers that represent an internet location identified by an IP address.
- Email Hosting — Another option from different web hosting companies, this provides dedicated email for you and your employees often with an address tied to your domain name.
- Linux Server — Linux is an open source software project that powers a wide variety of computing applications. Many of the world’s most popular websites run on Linux-powered servers and use Linux as its programming interface.
- NVMe SSD — NVMe hosting uses NVMe SSDs which offer even faster data transfer rates and lower latency than traditional SSDs. NVMe drives are designed for high-performance computing and are an excellent choice for websites that demand fast, reliable hosting.
- Redis — Redis, or Remote Dictionary Server, is an in-memory database structure with multiple functionalities, which improve a website’s availability and performance.
- SSD — SSD hosting is a type of web hosting that uses Solid State Drives instead of traditional hard disk drives. SSDs have no mechanical parts and use interconnected flash memory chips to store data, as opposed to the spinning disks used by hard disk drives.
- SSL — Secure Socket Layer refers to the encryption used when data is transferred from a customer to your website and vice-versa. This is a security standard that you must have if you want to have a safe online store presence.
- Uptime — This refers to how often your website is “up and running” and able to be accessed online. Most web hosting services will offer a 99% (or better) uptime guarantee.
Glossary of Hosting Software
- Adobe Commerce / Magento — Magento, also known as Adobe Commerce, is a versatile and powerful open source eCommerce platform written in PHP.
- WordPress — A free, open source content management system (CMS) and blogging platform that is user friendly. WordPress relies on the MySQL database service and PHP programming language to serve blog and page content to site visitors.
Hopefully, this will provide you with a good run-down of the most common terms found in web hosting.
