The field of website hosting is full of terms that seem unfamiliar, strange, and even a little intimidating. As website or blog owners, you should familiarize yourself with these terms a little more closely, because website hosting is a significant and important part of managing and promoting your site. Hosting is essentially the infrastructure, the foundation of the building on which you build and maintain your website.
We have compiled a glossary of terms related to website hosting for you:
Server - A server (or web server) is first and foremost a computer. It is usually a powerful computer with special management software installed on it. The server serves as the storage computer for your website. It stores the various files and the content management system (such as WordPress), and through it you can run various services such as email. The server is connected to the internet and displays your website to anyone who wants to see it. Technically, you can also store your website on your home computer (of course, it will need to undergo some configuration) and serve the website through your private computer. Almost no one does this, because it requires a powerful, fast computer with high-quality data communication that is available and stable 24/7. To do this, you simply purchase space on a server maintained by a website hosting company - it's like renting an apartment instead of buying a plot of land and building a house from scratch. With both methods, you will have a place to live, but one method is easier and cheaper, and allows for more flexibility in transferring the website if necessary.
IP address - A unique sequence of numbers that identifies different computers connected to the Internet (for example: 192.168.55.22). Your personal computer has an IP address, as does your mobile phone and any other device that connects to the Internet. Of course, the server hosting your website also has an IP address. This address allows different computers to connect and communicate with each other. Although it is possible to access websites by typing in their IP address, we usually type in their domain name (or click on a link or Google search result), and a special system of global servers, called DNS, tells our computer where the requested website is located and connects us to it.
Domain name - The domain name is the address of your website. For example: mysite.co.il. Typing the domain name in the address bar of your browser will take you to your website. This is an easy way to remember and access the site, even though there is always a numerical IP address behind the domain name. The IP address is difficult to remember and may also change from time to time when the server is replaced. Therefore, every website needs to purchase a domain, which is a kind of easy-to-recognize "tracking" number. When you type a website address into your browser (or even when you click on a Google search result), there is a whole system of international computers called DNS that checks where the server associated with the address you requested is located, what its IP address is, and redirects you to the website. The process takes very little time, so most users are completely unaware of it.
DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It is a network of servers that acts as the "phone book" of the internet. We access websites using their verbal address (e.g., thiswebsite.com), but behind every verbal address is a numerical IP address, which we need to connect to the site. So that we don't have to type or remember random strings of numbers, there are computers that do the redirecting for us, and these are called DNS servers.
Why do you need to know this term as a website owner? When you set up a new website, you buy a domain name for it. In order for every user to be able to reach the website, you need to update the "phone book" and tell the DNS what your website's IP address is. If you don't update the DNS, no one will be able to see your website. DNS updates are usually performed on the website of the company where you purchased the domain (this company is called a "domain registrar"). A DNS update must also be performed when transferring a website from one host to another, as the website's IP address will change.
Control Panel - When you purchase any type of hosting, you usually also get access to the server itself, in one way or another. So that you don't have to learn how to operate server operating systems, you are given a username and password for a graphical, user-friendly control panel that allows you to access certain functions on the server. cPanel is one such control panel, and it is the most popular control panel in the world in the server field. Through cPanel, you can perform actions such as opening an email account on your domain, setting up a database, managing files on the server, and more.
Shared hosting - Take one server, divide it into several "apartments," and you have a shared home with a large number of tenants. This is the essence of shared hosting - one server that hosts multiple websites. Each website is managed separately, but they share the server's resources (memory, hard disk space, etc.). The advantage - shared hosting is a cheap, convenient, and fast website hosting solution, suitable for small and medium-sized websites in most cases. The disadvantage? When one "tenant" on the server causes problems, you may suffer as a result - your website may be slow, for example, through no fault of your own. Unprofessional hosting companies also tend to overload a single server with a large number of websites, which causes problems with the server itself, even if all the websites are fine and functioning properly.
Virtual server - A virtual server, or VPS (short for Virtual Private Server), is a server that mimics storage on a dedicated physical server. In the past, anyone who needed particularly powerful and high-quality storage (and couldn't make do with shared storage) had to buy or rent a dedicated physical server, which would be theirs alone, and maintain it themselves. The costs were high, and maintenance required extensive technical knowledge. Storage on a virtual server combines the advantages of shared storage with the advantages of a physical server—you share a physical server with other websites, but your part of the server is managed independently, and all the relevant resources, such as memory and hard disk storage space, are yours alone. In other words, you still live in a kind of shared building, but you don't feel the presence of the other tenants in the building at all, and your apartment is actually a penthouse.