Hosting Glossary — Every Term, Plain English

The WebJi® hosting glossary defines 78 web hosting, domain, email, security and SEO terms in one line each, and every term links to its own plain-English guide. A further 9 guides explain the basics in Hindi.

The glossary says what a term means; the knowledgebase and tutorials show how to do the task, step by step. These eight terms are the ones visitors look up most.

These terms describe the machines, software layers and limits underneath every hosting plan. They decide speed, resilience and what a plan can run.

• Server: A computer that runs continuously to answer requests from other computers over a network.
• Web server: Software such as Apache, Nginx or LiteSpeed that receives browser requests and returns pages.
• LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP — the combination that runs WordPress and most PHP sites.
• Virtualisation: Running several isolated virtual machines on one physical server.
• Hypervisor: The software layer, such as KVM, that creates and runs virtual machines on physical hardware.
• Docker container: An application packaged with its libraries that runs in isolation on a shared operating-system kernel.
• Server clustering: Several servers working as one group so work continues when a member fails.
• Load balancing: Spreading incoming traffic across several servers so no single machine is overloaded.
• Data centre: A building that houses servers with redundant power, cooling and network links; tiers describe the redundancy.
• CDN: A content delivery network: servers in many cities that cache your files close to visitors.
• Cloud storage: Files kept on a provider's networked servers and reached over the internet.
• What is object storage: Storage that keeps files as objects in buckets, reached over an HTTP API; suited to backups and media.
• NVMe SSD: Solid-state storage connected over PCIe, much faster than SATA SSDs or hard disks.
• RAID: Combining several disks for speed, redundancy or both; it survives a disk failure but is not a backup.
• Uptime: The share of time a server or site is reachable, usually stated as a monthly percentage.
• Bandwidth: The volume of data transferred between a site and its visitors over a period, usually a month.
• Inode: One file or folder on a Linux account; hosts often cap inodes as well as disk space.
• SSH: Secure Shell: an encrypted command-line connection to a server.
• RDP: Remote Desktop Protocol: Microsoft's way to see and control a Windows server's desktop over the network.
• FTP account: A login for transferring files to and from a hosting account over FTP or SFTP.
• Cron job: A command scheduled to run automatically at set times on a Linux server.
• Apache log files: The access and error logs that record every request Apache serves and every error it meets.

Email terms cover how mail is sent and proved genuine; security terms cover what keeps a site encrypted, reachable and clean. Check a domain's mail records with the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checker.

• Business email address: An address on your own domain, such as sales@yourcompany.in.
• SMTP server: The server that sends outgoing mail and relays it to the recipient's mail server.
• Email forwarding: Automatically passing mail sent to one address on to another inbox.
• DKIM: A digital signature on outgoing mail that lets receivers verify it came from your domain unaltered.
• Email spoofing: Forging the From: address so a message appears to come from someone else's domain.
• Microsoft Exchange Server: Microsoft's mail and calendar server software, run on your own servers or as Exchange Online.
• What is an SSL certificate: A certificate that enables HTTPS, encrypting traffic and proving a site's identity to browsers.
• What is DDoS protection: Filtering that absorbs floods of junk traffic so a site stays reachable during an attack.
• WAF: A web application firewall: it inspects HTTP requests and blocks attacks such as SQL injection.
• Malware scanning: Checking a site's files and database for malicious code.

These terms cover how a site is built for visitors and how search engines find, read and rank it.

• Website: A set of linked pages under one domain, served from a web server.
• Responsive website: A site whose layout adapts to phone, tablet and desktop screens.
• Canonical URL: The preferred address for a page, declared with rel="canonical" when duplicates exist.
• robots.txt: A file at the site root telling crawlers which paths they may fetch.
• XML sitemap: A file listing a site's URLs so search engines can find them.
• Backlink: A link from another website to yours.
• Anchor text: The clickable words of a link.
• Domain authority: A third-party score from Moz estimating a site's link strength; it is not a Google metric.
• Content marketing: Publishing useful content to attract and keep customers.