Glossary¶
A quick reference for the terms you'll come across. Written for real people, not IT professionals.
A¶
Account area — Also called your client area. The front desk of your hosting, where you pay bills, open tickets, and see your services.
Addon domain — An additional, fully separate domain hosted on the same account as your main site.
B¶
Bandwidth — How much data your website can send to visitors in a given month. See What is bandwidth?.
C¶
CDN — Content Delivery Network. A service that copies your site's files to servers around the world so it loads faster for faraway visitors. See What is a CDN?.
Control panel — The workshop. The dashboard where you create websites, add email, set up databases, and manage domains.
D¶
DNS — The internet's address book. It turns a domain like example.com into the address where your website lives. See What is DNS?.
Domain — Your website's address, like example.com.
E¶
Encryption — Scrambling data so only the intended recipient can read it. Used by SSL to keep connections safe.
H¶
Hosting — The service that stores your website's files and makes them available to visitors.
HTTPS — The secure version of web traffic, identified by the padlock icon and https:// at the start of a web address.
I¶
IMAP — A way email is delivered that keeps messages in sync across all your devices (phone, computer, webmail).
IP address — The unique set of numbers that identifies a computer or server on the internet. See What is an IP address?.
M¶
Mailbox — An email account on your domain, like you@example.com.
P¶
Propagation — The wait (a few minutes to 48 hours) for a domain change to spread across the internet.
S¶
Server — A computer that's connected to the internet all the time and stores the files that make up websites. See What is a server?.
SSL / Certificate — The security feature that gives you the padlock and https://. Every Blue Nebula Hosting site includes a free one.
SSD — Solid-State Drive. Fast storage where your website's files live. See What is SSD storage?.
Subdomain — An extra prefix on your domain, like blog.example.com.
T¶
Two-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) — A second lock on your login, usually a code from your phone.
W¶
Webmail — Reading and sending email in a browser, no mail app needed. See What is webmail?.