There is a whole lot of jargon when it comes to web hosting, these companies seem to take pride in coming up with some of the most obscure and obtuse terminology which makes it hard for the average person to know exactly what they need. This glossary of web hosting terms should serve as a reference point to explain in more detail what all those terms mean.
Storage: Also referred to as disk space this is the amount of data you are able to store on your hosting account. Unless you are planning on running a huge multi-media website with lots of videos and audios it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever need more than a 2GB (2000 MB)– to put that in to perspective, it’s about 1,000 digital photos.
Bandwidth: Also referred to as transfer, imagine you are copying 10 files to another computer. Each file is 10 MB big, so in total you are transferring 100 MB of data. This is exactly the same as bandwidth. Every time someone views your site they are effectively downloading files from the server, every file that is downloaded counts towards your bandwidth allowance. Most normal websites will not need more than a few gigabytes of bandwidth each month – that’s more than enough for thousands of visitors to come to your site. The exception of course is if you are hosting videos, which can use all your monthly allowance very quickly.
Inodes: This is a fairly new concept introduced by some hosting companies who are offering ‘unlimited’ hosting. Many people are now asking what are inodes, the answer is very simple, it’s just a fancy way of saying the number of files on your hosting account! If you have 1,000 files, you are said to be using 1,000 inodes. Very easy!
Cpanel: This is the control panel used by a large majority of web hosting companies. Cpanel is by far the easiest control panel to use. You use it to manage things like your email accounts, file management, create and manage databases and other more technical things. Sometimes a hosting company will use Plesk, which is the competitor to Cpanel, but I recommend you always choose Cpanel hosting.
Fantastico: You will see this mentioned on many web hosting company websites. Fantastico is a 3rd party add-on for the Cpanel control panel that enables users to install over 40 different scripts with a click of a button. You can install everything from blogs to forums to support desks and even e-commerce shopping carts. It’s a very useful feature to have on your hosting account.
Domain: You probably know a domain name as a ‘dot com’. The technical name is a domain name and it doesn’t have to be a .com, there are over 100 different extensions to choose from like .net, .co.uk, .me etc. but they all do the same thing.
Add-on Domains: This is a fantastic new development for web hosting customers. Add-on domains means that while you only have one hosting account, you can add on more domains and they will be set up like completely independent websites – exactly as if they were on their own hosting account. It’s always worth looking for hosting companies that offer a good number of add-on domanis.
Subdomains: These are part of your main domain, so if your main domain name was example.com then a subdomain would look like name.example.com. It’s good for breaking up a large website, for example some sites will put their blog on a subdomain so it looks like this: blog.example.com
Overselling: A lot of hosting companies market themselves as not overselling their services. This refers to the number of customers they put on each server. For example, if they are renting their server and the hard drive has a 500 GB capacity, and then they tell their customers that each hosting account comes with 50 GB of space and they get 20 customers, they have effectively ‘oversold’ the server specification by 100%. Virtually all servers are oversold because the hosting company knows that in reality people will only use a fraction of the space and bandwidth allotted to them.
Dedicated IP: An IP address is a set of numbers assigned to an individual server. An IP address may be shared by dozens, sometimes hundreds of different websites. Some hosting companies try and upsell you a dedicated IP address, but the truth is that unless you are an e-Commerce store and need a secure connection there is no reason to get a dedicated IP address.
Name servers: This is one of the most complex parts of web hosting, setting the name servers of your domain. You can think of the name servers as the Internet addressing system. When you type a domain name in your browser what happens is that it asks where this domain is located by looking at the name servers. The name servers are associated with an IP address which in turn is associated with a server. Sounds complicated but luckily you don’t need to know all that!