HOSTING / THE WORDS BEHIND THE PLAN
Hosting Terms in Plain English
Use this glossary beside a quote. A technical definition helps, but the service description and contract determine what your plan includes.
- Alias
- An additional email address that routes to a mailbox or group. It does not necessarily add a login, storage or another paid seat.
- Bandwidth / transfer
- Bandwidth is a data rate; transfer is a quantity moved over time. Sales pages sometimes use “bandwidth” to mean a monthly transfer allowance—check the unit.
- CDN
- A content delivery network that caches or forwards content through distributed locations. It does not automatically remove the need for an origin.
- Concurrency
- How many operations can run at once. A monthly request allowance says nothing by itself about simultaneous capacity.
- DNS zone
- A set of authoritative DNS data for a domain or delegated part of a domain. It is not a website or server.
- Egress
- Data leaving a service or network boundary. The billable destination and whether the path is internet or inter-region depend on the tariff.
- Fair-use policy
- Conditions on acceptable resource use. Ask for measurable thresholds, excluded workloads, notice and consequences.
- GB / GiB
- A decimal gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes; a gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. They are not identical capacities.
- Inode / file-count limit
- A limit associated with filesystem entries. Many tiny files can exhaust a file-count allowance while disk space remains.
- Latency
- Time taken for a request or part of a connection. More bandwidth does not automatically reduce every source of latency.
- Managed
- Specified operational work performed for you. Ask which layer, tasks, hours and failure scenarios are covered.
- Metered / consumption
- Use is counted in defined units. Billing may include an allowance, minimums, tiers or a hard stop.
- Origin
- The service that supplies the original website or application response behind a proxy or CDN.
- Oversubscription
- Allocating shared capacity across customers based on the expectation that not everyone peaks together. Ask what sustained performance is actually committed.
- RPO / RTO
- Recovery point objective describes tolerable data loss measured in time. Recovery time objective describes the target time to restore service. Neither is proof that a restore has been tested.
- SLA
- A service-level agreement defining measurements, commitments, exclusions and remedies. A credit is not the same as avoiding an outage.
- Snapshot
- A point-in-time representation of data or a volume. Its independence, consistency and retention determine whether it satisfies a recovery need.
- TTL
- DNS time to live: how long an answer may be cached. Existing cached answers do not all vanish immediately after a DNS edit.
- Unmetered / unlimited
- Labels for a specific resource or item under a plan’s terms. Neither means all resources, rates and uses are unrestricted.
- vCPU
- A virtual CPU allocation. Performance also depends on hardware, scheduling, sharing and burst rules; counts alone are not a speed comparison.