What is Web Hosting?

Good Question, when I started in the world of e-commerce I was clueless what all these terms were. Now, 5 years later I’m excited to share in this article 7 top terms used in the web hosting lingo.

Web Hosting – If you think of web hosting as a whole then you can think of it as where your website lives. Your website has to have a place to store and manage all of its visitors.

Domain Name – This is the name of your house, Your address online

Search Engine – When people say, “search engine indexes my site” It means that each search provider online creates a special program to search and index all pages, categories, and products to compare the content in your descriptions to the keywords you have selected to use on the page. It is called indexing.

Other terms you may hear relating to search engines – bots, spiders, web crawlers they are all essentially the same thing.

SEO – This is sometimes the hardest aspect of your website to grasp. SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization. In order for your website to be seen and rated properly by search engines you have to build relevant keyword rich content into your pages, descriptions, products, optimize images, etc. This is my definition of Search Engine Optimization – basically lots of keyword rich content writing to do. There are two types of SEO one is On-Site and one is Off-Site. It is important to optimize both.

Availability (Uptime) - Refers to the amount of time within a 24 hour period a system is active or available for servicing requests. For example, if a hosting company says it is available 99.9% of the time, they are claiming that your web site will up all the time except for about 8 seconds each day. This is less than 48hours total over a 12 month period.

Shopping Cart Software - A software program which acts as an "Online Storefront". Such software typically allows a web site user to create and manage an online storefront with shopping cart to which items can be added or removed. Once a customer is ready to "check out", this same Shopping Cart Software typically includes interfaces to allow customers to pay with their credit card directly on the site. Shopping Cart Software is critical for those web sites that intend to sell products and services directly over the Internet without human intervention.