In the web hosting industry, there is a lot of jargon and acronyms that can be confusing to navigate, let alone understand. Most web hosting terminology is downright complicated.
To make matters worse, many web hosts use the same web hosting terminology to talk about different things. If you’ve ever wondered:
- What kinds of backup types can I use?
- What is high availability?
- What is bare metal hardware?
This blog is for you.
Below you can find definitions for our most common hosting acronyms to help you make a more informed decision regarding your hosting needs.
Top 20 Most Used Web Hosting Terminology
1. A+B Power
Server reliability is further enhanced by plugging each power supply into a different circuit breaker.
2. Bare Metal Backups
These are disk-based backups that greatly increase the speed of complete system recovery from a catastrophic failure. Unlike traditional backups, there is no need to partition the drive and install an operating system.
3. Cloud Dedicated Servers
Our Cloud Dedicated Servers allow you to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud but still provide you with the power of dedicated hardware, and include transparent technical specifications.
4. Cloud Scaling
The ability to easily create or destroy server images using the Liquid Web Cloud VPS Platform in order to add additional space or computing power.
5. Content Delivery Network
A large distributed system of servers deployed in strategically located nodes, all over the world, to facilitate faster delivery of content to end users.
6. Continuous Backups
Backup completed by Liquid Web Acronis Cyber Backup, these files are kept in a journal of disk changes. These incremental backups know what sectors on the disk have changed before the backup operation even starts. Continuous or incremental backups are one of several options for backing up data.
7. Dedicated Servers
Our Dedicated Servers offer customers their own private hardware, as well as their own network and storage space. They are completely customizable and give the customer full control of their environment. Because the equipment is only used by your own applications, they are completely isolated and won’t suffer from slow speeds because of any “noisy neighbors.”
8. Disaster Recovery
A plan that prepares for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure is vital to an organization after a disaster, be it natural or man-made.
9. Enterprise Hosting
Our Enterprise Hosting packages allow customers to provision our powerful Managed Dedicated Servers together with load balancing and other redundancy technologies, providing a highly available environment. They provide paramount durability, easy scaling, and the ability to pay for only what you use. Enterprise Hosting environments often include dedicated servers hosting databases along with virtualized servers hosting websites or other front-end applications.
10. Failover
The capability to switch over automatically to a redundant, or standby, computer server in the instance of the original server’s failure.
11. Fault Tolerant
Fault tolerance refers to a system that can continue its main operation, possibly at a reduced level, instead of failing completely, when some part of the system fails.
12. Full Management
Fully managed plans at Liquid Web include 24/7 phone, email and chat support, full hardware and software management, a 100% uptime service level agreement, full control panel support, and Beyond Scope Support for 3rd party applications.
13. Hot Swappable
A server that is “hot-swappable” allows Liquid Web to replace hardware components without significant interruption to the system.
14. Load Balancing
Load balancing distributes data across a network of servers in order to ensure that a single Web server does not get overloaded with work, ensuring maximum uptime.
15. Off-Server Backups
Off-server backups are stored at a location away from the main location of your hosting services as part of a disaster recovery plan. This creates geographical redundancy, ensuring that a back up will be available no matter what happens to your original data. Liquid Web utilizes Acronis Cyber Backup to achieve this for Dedicated and VMware customers.
16. PCI Compliance
A fully-managed scanning service at Liquid Web that verifies your compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Council. The PCI DSS Council requires that your organization takes all the necessary steps to protect sensitive customer data and provides a set of standards for your infrastructure and server setup.
17. Private Cloud
The Private Cloud is similar to the public cloud, with all of the same benefits (scalability and reliable uptime) but with increased security and control over data. Liquid Web offers the Private Cloud powered by VMware and NetApp.
18. Server Clusters
Server clustering groups together servers, either loosely or tightly, so they work together and can be viewed as a single system.
19. Server Hardening
The process of securing a server by reducing its surface vulnerability. There are a number of methods by which this can be done, but overall, the more your server does, the larger a vulnerability surface it has.
20. VPS Hosting
Our Virtual Private Servers (VPS) provide the control and customizability of a dedicated server along with the affordability, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud. For VPS servers, we create multiple virtual private servers on one Cloud Dedicated Server.
Liquid Web is Here to Help
It is our hope that this list of 20 brief definitions for the most frequently asked about the most common hosting acronyms that we use at Liquid Web provides some insight past all the industry jargon. Breaking through the fog of technical vernacular can be difficult for those unfamiliar with the industry, so we are always here to help.
We believe in complete transparency when it comes to working with our customers and would be happy to explain any of the industry “jargon” we use. The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting
are here to help!
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