Webhosting sites like to use a torrential amount of jargon to prove to you how sophisticated they are and, in some cases, to try to make it so you don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain, so to speak. It’s rather important that you make sure to know what all of the jargon means so that you don’t get confused. Here are a few examples.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth simply refers to how much information can pass through your site in a particular month. It takes a bit of information to load everything on your page. The more you have to load on your page, such as videos, pictures, audio and so on, the more bandwidth you’ll eat up. If you have so many visitors or the visitors you have reload the pages over and over again, you could eat up the bandwidth for your site pretty quickly, especially if you end up giving yourself very much of it in the first place. This makes it important that you pay attention to this when you’re checking out the service. Bandwidth also refers to how much data can be transferred to your server at any given time. This means that your site might turn away new viewers if there are too many people trying to access it all at the same time.

The Cloud

Some web hosting sites will have extra cloud services. The “Cloud” refers to storage space that you can access wherever you are and no matter what you’re doing as long as you have website access. Examples of file cloud services, for example, include Google Drive and Dropbox.

DDOS

This stands for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. Most web hosting services will have packages to help them fight a DDoS attack if it occurs on your site. They may charge more money for more protection in case something like this happens. This attack is very common for network devices. Basically it overwhelms the bandwidth at a given moment on the server by having many different people or computers all try to access your site rapidly and over and over again. If someone wants to shut down your site, this is one of the easiest ways to do it. If they are successful, it means that other more legitimate traffic won’t have a way of getting to your site. They will try to connect and instead it will say that the site is down. This could lead them to conclude that the site wasn’t there to begin with, or else that it was poorly managed.

Servers need protection from viruses and other threats just as much as regular computers do. The strength of a web hosting service’s firewall is often a big selling point in terms of how much you’ll trust the service in general. After all, if hackers want to get access to the files on your site this is one of the ways they might try to do it. This means that if you have a company that has a lot of sensitive information that’s located here and there, then you need to make sure that that information is safe on whatever device that you put it.

Overall, it’s just a good idea to read carefully through all the contracts and site information that you can and decipher all of the jargon there in order to make sure that the service isn’t going to try to sneak one by your just because you don’t happen to know what a particular word might mean.