Digital marketing term
Hosting
The service that keeps a site’s files, database, and mail on a machine reachable from the internet. A domain does nothing until DNS points it at that server.
Detailed explanation
Web hosting is rented space and compute so HTML, images, and a CMS can answer requests around the clock. Shared, VPS, cloud, and managed WordPress plans differ in control, noisy neighbors, and price—not in the basic job.
Undersizing shows up as slow TTFB and 503s; oversizing wastes budget. SSL, backups, and FTP access usually come with the plan; mail deliverability is a separate check. Uploading into the wrong home directory looks like an outage even when the server is healthy.
Judge a host on uptime, TTFB, bandwidth caps, and backup restore tests. Crawl errors and weak Core Web Vitals often trace back here before they trace back to the theme.
Frequently asked questions
- When is shared hosting no longer enough?
- When CPU, RAM, or concurrent-visit limits trip regularly. Then a VPS or managed plan usually cuts timeouts more than another plugin tweak.
- Is a domain the same as hosting?
- No. The domain is the name; hosting is the machine. DNS has to point the name at that machine.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- DomainThe name people type and see in the address bar: brand word plus extension. Email, TLS, and canonical URLs hang off it; swapping it on a whim splits every signal.
- Home DirectoryThe folder on a hosting account that the web server treats as the site’s public root—often named public_html, www, or htdocs. Files dropped in the wrong folder never appear at the domain.
- SSLThe certificate layer that encrypts traffic between browser and server; in practice you see TLS and HTTPS. The padlock is a trust cue, and HTTPS is a light ranking signal as well.
- BandwidthHow much data a host will transfer in a period: megabytes and gigabytes out, not headcount. A few heavy videos can exhaust a plan faster than a quiet text site.
- FTPAn older protocol for moving files between a computer and a server. Themes and backups still travel this way; classic FTP can send passwords in the clear.
- CMSSoftware that separates content from code so editors can ship pages, images, and URLs as HTML. You should not need an FTP login for every glossary update.