Most common features everyone must know about web hosting, when you suppose to have a domain and host a website.  You may find a bit difficult to understand the terminology behind web hosting and the services you will be going to use while hosting your website. So, this WebHosting Glossary kicks your difficulty away.

This webhosting glossary helps you identify the new hosting terminology easily.

There are different types of web hosting with the most simple one being shared hosting to dedicated hosting. Webhosting glossary explains about different hostings.

• Dedicated Hosting : This is a hosting account, where just a single user(one domain) would take charge of the entire server, and assume full control of all resources allocated to that particular user.

• Virtual Hosting : Virtual Private Server refers to a partitioned server so that each partition will function as a dedicated server. It is not as expensive as a dedicated server but offers a lot more in term of flexibility and functionality when compare  with a shared hosting.

• Reseller Hosting : When an individual acquires a block of server resources from an original web host only to repackage the resources and resell these as its own hosting services, under its own name​

• Shared Hosting :  Where some "n" number of users were put together in one server and share all the server resources to every user. Since the recent computers are powerful with many advanced features, most personal and business sites can be hosted on the same server without effecting the system performance.

• Windows Hosting : In contrast to Linux server, this is a server uses Windows OS. Such plan costs a bit more but it is necessary if you design your websites using asp .net, MsSql and few more windows features.

Once you decide which hosting to choose, the most important thing one should have a good idea about how to manage the hosting plan you order. This webhosting glossary helps you get familiar with the cpanel terminology

Whoever is having good technical skills they can manage a server without having any UI, where as a layman couldn't. So, to provide a better and easy to understand, everything handy, a control panel is created. It is nothing but a cPanel. Let us see few features of cPanel in this webhosting glossary which you use regularly when you had a cPanel hosting. Let's check these features one by one.

In this webhosting glossary domain section, lets see about addon domain, sub-domain, domain aliases and what is a domain redirection.

• Add-domain : It is an additional domain which can be create from the main domain control panel without having a separate hosting account. It had all features just like a main domain, but with no cPanel control.

• Sub-domain : A subdomain is a subsection of your website that can exist as a new website without a new domain name. Use subdomains to create memorable URLs for different content areas of your site. For example, you can create a subdomain for your blog that is accessible through blog.fastwebhost.in and https://www.fastwebhost.in/blog

• Redirects : A redirect allows you to make one domain redirect to another domain, either for a website or a specific web page. For example, create a redirect so that www.example.com automatically redirects users to www.example.net.

• Domain aliases : It makes your website available from another domain name. For example, you can create www.example.net and www.example.org and show the same content which was on www.example.com

This webhosting glossary section explains different features of the files you will be managing in your cPanel.

• File Manager : cPanel organizes all the files on your account into folders. Use the File Manager interface to manage and edit your files.

• FTP Accounts : Add and configure FTP Accounts to get your website on the internet fast. FTP allows you to manage the files of  your website through an FTP client such as FileZilla.

• Disk Usage : Monitor your account's available space with the Disk Usage feature. All the stats shown are relative to the largest directory first.

This webhosting glossary section will explain you different options to protect your webhosting files and how to take backup of the files from cPanel.

• Directory Privacy : Set a password to protect certain directories of your account. When you enable this feature, a user who tries to open a folder which is in protection mode will be shown a prompt to enter a username and password before they can access your content. 

• Backup and Full Backup : Download a zip copy of your entire site or a part of your site that you can save to your computer. A full backup creates an archive of all of your website’s files and configuration. You can use this file to move your account to another server or to keep a local copy of your files.

This webhosting glossary section will explain you different options of managing databases which relates to your website.

• MySQL Databases : Manage large amounts of information over the web easily. MySQL databases are necessary to run many web-based applications, such as bulletin boards, content management systems, and online shopping carts.

• phpMyAdmin : phpMyAdmin can manage a whole MySQL server (needs a super-user) as well as a single database.

• MySQL Database Wizard : MySQL Databases allow you to store lots of information in an easy to access manner. Here you can create both the database and database user in one shot.

• Remote MySQL : Add a specific domain name to allow visitors to connect to your MySQL databases. You can manage databases from other servers also.

In this webhosting glossary section you will be experiencing the email features which could help you in managing your email accounts you create in your cPanel.

• Email Accounts : Manage the email accounts associated with your domain. All the email accounts can be managed from this panel. Use the Set Up Mail Client interface to add an email account to your mobile device or desktop email client.

• Email Forwarders : Send a copy of any incoming email from one address to another.

• Autoresponders : Configure an email account to send automated emails. This can be useful if you are on vacation or unavailable, or if you have a generic message that you wish to send from a support email address.

• Tracking Email Delivery : Review an email’s delivery route. This can be useful if you need to locate problems with email delivery.

• Email Disk Usage : This utility allows you to recover disk space by deleting old messages from your mailbox. It displays all the folders and how much disk space it is being used by particular folder.

• Email Filters : Create and manage email filters for an email address that you specify. This can be useful if you want to avoid spam, redirect mail, or pipe messages to a program.

• Authetication : Email authentication helps prevent spam. The options below attempt to equip email messages with verifiable information so that the nature of incoming and outgoing messages can be detected automatically.

• DKIM :  It means verifying incoming email. It ensures that incoming messages are unmodified and are from the sender from whom they claim to be. This feature works to prevent incoming spam messages.

• SPF : This system allows you to specify servers and IP addresses that have authority to send mail from your domain(s). This feature works to prevent outgoing spam messages.

This webhosting glossary session helps you check the metrics for each domain hosted under your cpanel. It provides different metric like bandwidth usage, number of visitors visiting your website, errors on your website, raw stats, awstats, webalizer stats and so.

• WebSite Errors : This function will display the last 300 errors for your site. This can be very useful for finding broken links or problems with missing files. Checking this log frequently can help keep your site running smoothly.

• Bandwidth Usage : This function allows you to see the bandwidth usage for your site. It shows the current month’s bandwidth usage, as well as your total bandwidth usage.

• Visitors : This function displays up to 1,000 of the most recent entries in the Apache log for a given domain’s web site.

• Raw Access Logs : Raw Access Logs allow you to see who has visited your website without displaying graphs, charts, or other graphics.

• Awstats : Awstats produces visual statistics about visitors of your site.

• Webalizer Stats : Webalizer is a complex stats program that produces a variety of charts and graphs about who has visited your site.

This webhosting glossary session helps you check few security features from your webhosting control panel.

• Hotlink Protection : Hotlink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don’t specify below (ie. html files).  The end result is that the other site is stealing your bandwidth. 

• Leech Protection : Leech Protect allows you to prevent your users from giving out or publicly posting their passwords to a particular area of your site. 

• SSL/TLS : The SSL/TLS Manager will allow you to generate SSL certificates, certificate signing requests, and private keys. These are all parts of using SSL to secure your website. SSL allows you to secure pages on your site so that information such as logins, credit card numbers, etc are sent encrypted instead of plain text. 

• ModSecurity : ModSecurity is a web application firewall that can work either embedded or as a reverse proxy. It provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring, logging and real-time analysis.

• IP Blocker : This feature will allow you to block a range of IP addresses to prevent them from accessing your site. You can also enter a fully qualified domain name, and the IP Deny Manager will attempt to resolve it to an IP address for you.

This webhosting glossary session helps you check PHP features from your webhosting control panel.

• Multi PHP Manager : The system default PHP version is set by the system administrator. Any domain that is set to the inherit value indicates that it does not have its own PHP version explicitly set.

• PHP Selector : A default PHP version will be set server wide. So, this option allows you to select the PHP version as per your website compatibility. Even you can also select the modules as per your application requirement.

• Optimize Website : This feature allows you to optimize the performance of your website by tweaking the way Apache handles the requests.

• Softaculous App Installer : FastWebHost provides you an APP installer which provides you an option to select the one click script installers. This includes the scripts like wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento and many more.

• FWH Site Builder : With our FWH Site builder you can create your website with 3 simple steps. You can choose a template, add the features you require and can customize your design.

This webhosting glossary session helps you understand how to handle cron jobs, error pages  and how to scan your website files.

• Cron Jobs : Cron jobs allow you to automate certain commands or scripts on your site. You can set a command or script to run at a specific time every day, week, etc. For example, you could set a cron job to delete temporary files every week to free up disk space.

• Error Pages : An error page informs a visitor when there is a problem accessing your site. Each type of problem has its own code. Basic error pages are automatically provided by the web server (Apache). However, if you prefer, you can create a custom error page for any valid HTTP status code beginning in 4 or 5.

• Virus Scanner : All cPanel users will be having an option to scan their website and email content with a default virus scanner.

This webhosting glossary session helps you understand how to track your domain, handling Apache connections and different MIME types.

• Track DNS : Network Tools allow a user to find out information about any domain. Finding out information about a domain can be useful in making sure your DNS is set up properly as you will find out information about your IP address as well as your DNS.

• Apache Handlers : All cPanel users will be having an option to scan their website and email content with a default virus scanner. Apache handlers control how the Apache web server software manages certain file types and extensions for your site. You can configure Apache to handle a new file type with an existing handler by manually adding the handler and extension

• MIME Types :  MIME types tell browsers how to handle specific extensions. For example, the text/html MIME type equates to .htm, .html, and .shtml extensions on most servers, and this tells your browser to interpret all files with those extensions as HTML files.

The above webhosting glossary article covers most of the features which will be seen in most of the cPanel's. Once you complete reading this article it is easy for you to manage all basic cPanel features and we recommend you to explore for more features.