Hosting Terms
Website hosting
Hosting is the service of keeping your website on a “server” so that users can have access to the pages on our website. There is an admin panel, where you can access the setting of the hosting.
Hosting packages
Starfish sells yearly hosting packages. Starting from free to very expensive. The difference is mainly in speed and security. With the package, we set up and deal with the website hosting company. Client deals with us.
Website hosting company
These are companies that provide a website hosting service. GoDaddy, A2 hosting are popular hosting companies. Hosting companies charge a monthly or yearly fee to website owners.
cPanel / cPanel Access
Developers may ask for this too. Password protected dashboard that lets developers use to administer a website in stored in a hosting company.
Email hosting
Where people store their emails. It can be with their hosting company or elsewhere like Gmail.
Server
A server is a computer that hosts one or many websites. It’s different to a normal computer because its job is to “serve” information to another computer (your computer) that displays the information.
Domain name
The name of the website (e.g., www.facebook.com). Name is owned by the client. Not usually purchased by Starfish. Ownership of domain needs to be renewed every year or so with a Domain Name Registrar.
Subdomain
A subdomain is a web address that has a format like this XXX.domainname.com, where XXX is the subdomain name. This is used so that you can have many websites under one domain name, e.g., YYY.domainname.com or ZZZ.domainname.com. We use subdomains to be able to access our development websites.
Domain Name Registrar
Company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. Where you buy your domain name from: could be GoDaddy, which is also a hosting company.
DNS propagation
DNS propagation is the time frame it takes for DNS changes to be updated across the Internet. A change to a DNS record can take up to 72 hours to propagate worldwide, although it typically takes a few hours.
DNS record
FTP / FTP Access
A username and password needed by developers, sometimes so that they upload files to the host. Generally not needed because most changes can be done through the WordPress admin panel.
Cloud Hosting
An advanced type of hosting service that’s provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. They are faster, more difficult to set up and more expensive. We don’t use them normally, but of our clients may.
SSL Certificate
You can buy a premium one separately or you can use a default one that comes with our hosting packages. It shows a little padlock icon in your browser because it means that the connection is safe and details of the client can’t be stolen. E-commerce websites must have them but nowadays all websites have them anyway.