Few Important Web Hosting Terminologies – Glossary

This web hosting glossary should help you while you shop around for a web hosting provider to host your website

• Add-On Domain A different website within your account that shares the resources of your hosting plan.


• Parked Domain A separate web domain pointing to your current account. People generally buy .com and .net versions. Either of them gives the same information.


• Dedicated IP An IP address that will be used by your website independently. A dedicated IP is a must for using SSL for accepting payment through your website.


• SSL An acronym for Secure Socket Layer, it is an encryption mainly used for eCommerce websites for secure payments through credit cards. When you use SSL in your site, you will find ‘https://’ in the address bar on the secure page.


• Bandwidth Amount of data transfer used on your account, whenever an email is received or sent, or when files are downloaded and uploaded.


• Disk Space Amount of space allocated on your web server for storing files, web pages, emails, etc.


• Uptime Amount of time your web server would be completely accessible and not interrupted by technical errors. It is calculated in terms of percentage. An uptime of 99% or more is considered ideal.


• .htaccess Determines permissions on what can be accessed by a particular file, by establishing certain parameters on them.


• FTP An acronym for File Transfer Protocol, it enables the uploading and downloading of files.


• SSH An acronym for Secure Shell that allows file transfer. Not many shared hosts allow this kind of file transfer.


• Control Panel The central hub for a web hosting account, whereby the user makes changes and controls different aspects of web hosting, like adding new domains & sub-domains, installing server applications and uploading web pages.


• MySQL A database system that can be found in many web hosting packages. It is frequently used for a number of web applications.