Hosting Glossary
DDoS Attack
What DDoS Attack actually means, minus the jargon — with the example that makes it obvious.
The short answer
A DDoS attack floods a target with traffic from many sources at once, aiming to exhaust its capacity and knock it offline.
Below: the fuller explanation, an analogy that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you'll actually meet it.
100+
Terms in this glossary
2 min
Average read
Plain
English, promised
24/7
Humans if you're stuck
Distributed origins (botnets of hijacked devices) make source-blocking futile — mitigation instead absorbs and scrubs the flood upstream, passing legitimate traffic through. Rental 'booter' services made small attacks cheap enough that ordinary sites see them.
Included network-level protection (standard on our VPS and hosting) turns most attacks into graphs rather than outages; scale beyond that is a mitigation-capacity arms race the provider fights.
DDoS Attack, by analogy
A flash mob blocking a shop's doorway — no lock is picked; genuine customers simply can't get through the engineered crowd until stewards filter it.
Hold onto that picture and most of the documentation you'll ever read about it becomes considerably less mysterious.
What this means for your site
The threat has commoditised — disputes, extortion scripts and stray botnet tests generate attacks against unremarkable sites, making always-on mitigation baseline hygiene rather than enterprise luxury.
You don't need to operate this layer daily — you need to recognise it when it's the explanation for something, which is exactly when this page pays for itself.
A concrete example
A gaming community's server draws a rival's rented booter attack — mitigation scrubs the flood upstream, players notice mild lag, and the attacker's rental money buys a graph spike.
Ordinary, once seen — which is the point: most hosting concepts are simple machinery wearing intimidating names.
Where you'll meet it on our platform
You'll meet it in the control panel and occasionally in a support conversation — usually already configured the right way. If this term made sense, the natural next reads are Firewall, WAF, Uptime and CDN.
Support is answered by real people around the clock — including the questions other hosts call out of scope.
Jargon is a service failure
We think unexplained jargon is a service failure — this glossary is the support desk's accumulated translations, published where the search engines can hand them out.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching are standard here, not premium-tier extras.
- 100+ terms, plain English
- Analogies and real examples
- Cross-linked related concepts
- Written by the support desk
Why HostingAlly
What you get with every plan
Linked, not siloed
Related terms cross-reference, so one lookup becomes a working understanding.
Grounded in a real platform
Examples reference the hosting you'd actually use, not abstract diagrams.
Analogies that stick
Each concept gets a picture you'll remember at the moment you actually need it.
The practical stakes named
Not just what it is — when it's the answer to a problem you're having.
Honest about what you can skip
Most terms are recognise-level, not operate-level — the glossary says which is which.
Plain English first
Every term defined for site owners, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated, not restated.
Getting Started
How to get going
- 1
Spot it in your own setup
The fastest way to learn a hosting term is to find it in your own panel — five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 2
Check the defaults
Our platform ships sane defaults for this — verify rather than assume, and you'll know your setup instead of hoping about it.
- 3
Follow the related terms
Concepts travel in packs — Firewall, WAF and Uptime complete this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
Included
What's covered on our plans
- Daily automatic backups with self-service restores
- DDoS protection at the network level
- 99.9% uptime commitment, monitored around the clock
- NVMe SSD storage as standard
- SSH, Git and Composer access on developer-friendly plans
- Email accounts on your own domain
- cPanel — the industry-standard control panel
- LiteSpeed server-level caching
- No setup fees, ever
- Per-site PHP version selection
FAQ
Your questions, answered
Why would anyone DDoS my small site?
Impersonality — extortion scripts, disputes, competitor spite and botnet testing target addresses, not fame. The attacks are cheap and automated; the defence being included is what makes the question moot.
Can I stop a DDoS by blocking IPs?
No — thousands of rotating sources defeat list-based blocking by design. Mitigation is a capacity-and-filtering problem solved upstream at network level, which is why it's provider infrastructure rather than a customer setting.
Can I host more than one website on a plan?
On the Pro tier and above, yes — multiple sites with their own domains, email and SSL under one account. If the extra sites belong to clients rather than you, reseller hosting gives each one proper isolation instead.
What does your 24/7 support actually cover?
Real people at every hour, and a scope that includes the practical questions — email setup, DNS, WordPress issues, restores — not just 'the server is up, ticket closed'. Pre-sales questions are welcome too; ask us something difficult and judge the reply.
Will you move my existing website for free?
Yes — open a ticket with your current host's access details and we handle the whole move: files, databases, email and configuration, verified by you before DNS switches. The old site keeps serving until the new copy takes over, so visitors never see a gap.
Is there a money-back guarantee?
Yes — try the hosting properly and if it doesn't fit, the refund process is a request, not a retention gauntlet. Domain registrations are the one standard carve-out, since registries make those non-refundable the moment they're placed.
Are backups included, and can I restore them myself?
Daily automatic backups are standard, restorable from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both, at 3am without a ticket if that's when you need it. For extra cover, you're welcome to run your own offsite copies alongside.
Keep exploring
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN caches your site's assets on servers around the world, serving each visitor from the nearest edge ins…
Firewall
A firewall filters network traffic by rule — deciding which connections may reach which services, and refus…
Web Hosting
NVMe cPanel hosting with free SSL, migration and a free first-year domain.
VPS Hosting
KVM virtual servers with root access, DDoS protection and flat pricing.
Your site deserves better hosting.
Fast NVMe hosting, free SSL and migration, and real people on support around the clock — at prices that stay put.
See Hosting Plans