In addition to knowing the types of website hosting, it is important that you know some technical terms used by companies and professionals that offer these services.
1) Bandwidth
The bandwidth is directly related to a number of visits the site receives. The more visitors a site has, the greater its traffic consumption on the hosting. Code-optimized sites consume less hosting features and therefore support a greater number of visits. In addition, this limit does not take into account traffic peaks, but a constant traffic.
In general, each hosting plan comes with a defined traffic limit. Some specify the bandwidth, others the number of visitors. Some companies sell unlimited traffic, which in turn also has its limitations. About this, read our post: Unlimited Hosting – understand what you’re taking.
2) Subdomain
A subdomain is a branch of the domain and is often used for blogs and virtual stores that are “attached” to the main site, which works in the domain. Therefore, if the main site is nestify.io, the blog.nestify.io would be a subdomain.
In addition to bringing a pleasing aesthetic to pages, subdomains help users identify where the site is (by viewing the URL in the browser) and also help the administrator measure the number of visits in each area. In place of the subdomain, a folder could also be used, thus: nestify.io/blog.
3) FTP
FTP is the acronym for File Transfer Protocol. It exists to facilitate access to files from the site and speeds up the process of passing these files to a hosting service. As a more technical tool, it is used by designers and developers. More lay users can use the file manager, offered by hosting companies.
4) Space
The storage capacity of the provider (or server) is commonly called disk space. It is the space that determines the number of files that can be stored in the hosting. Usually, space is measured in Gigabytes (GB) or Terabytes (TB) – 1 GB equals 1024 MB, and 1 TB to 1024 GB.
Some companies offer unique disk spaces for the website, email, and database. Others offer a single space to be shared across the hosting account. There are even companies that offer unlimited disk space. In this case, it is important to know that this space must be compatible with a personal or small business website, and it is not allowed to use the hosting as a file repository.
5) Redirection
Redirection is one of the most versatile tools within a hosting service. As the name says, it is possible to redirect a page to an address in its own domain or to an external domain.
For example, it would be possible to direct www.mydomain.com to www.yourdomain.com. Or, you could redirect a page that no longer exists to a substitute page within the same domain. Another very common situation would be to have two equal domains, one “.com” and another “.co.uk” and redirect the secondary to the principal. This would ensure that the user would find your site, no matter which of the two domains they typed.
6) File manager
The file manager is the basis of managing a website. It is possible to manage the folders and files that make up the site structure. It is also in the file manager that downloads, uploads, deletions and file changes are made. It is a more user-friendly version than FTP, for non-technical users.
To get even deeper into the technical language of the website hosting universe, visit our WordPress Hosting Glossary from A to Z!
