Hosting Explained

Three ways to host a website, one real question underneath all of them: how much of the server do you actually need to yourself?

A drag-and-drop page builder buys visual control and costs some site speed. Whether that trade is worth it depends on who is building the site.

Ten .htaccess rules that come up again and again, from forcing HTTPS to blocking hotlinking, with working syntax for each one.

Three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one of them off-site — a decades-old backup rule that maps neatly onto a website.

The commands that come up constantly on a real VPS, grouped by what you are actually trying to do rather than listed alphabetically.

Almost every migration horror story traces back to one of a small, predictable set of causes.

Everything worth checking before you point a domain at a new site and tell people about it, in the order that actually makes sense.

Every task a website move involves, grouped into before, during, on switch day, and the week after.

A VPS is an isolated slice of shared hardware; a dedicated server is the entire physical machine to yourself. Here is what that changes.

Neither version is technically better any more; the only real mistake is leaving both live without one properly redirecting to the other.

A domain going past its renewal date is the start of a multi-stage process, not the end of one, and each stage costs more than the last.

The system that turns a domain name into the address of a server, and what really happens in the gap between typing and loading.

How a spoofed email fakes its sender address, why it is possible at all, and the records that make it harder to pull off.

A website is files sitting on a computer that never turns off. Here is what a host actually does and why you need one.

Software that lets you add and edit pages without touching code. Here is what it actually does, and when you can skip it.

A single hosting account split into packages you sell under your own name, with none of the server administration attached.

A decades-old vulnerability that still appears in new code, and the small set of habits that reliably prevent it.

A vocabulary for describing a page in terms a machine can parse directly, and what it can realistically earn you.

The topics a hosting terms of service and acceptable use policy genuinely need to address, before a dispute forces you to work it out.

What a content delivery network actually does, and the honest answer to whether your site needs one.

A flood of traffic from many sources at once, aimed at overwhelming a site rather than breaking into it. Here is what it actually looks like.

A dedicated, isolated slice of a physical server that behaves like your own machine, with root access and nobody else sharing your resources.

A filter sitting in front of your site that inspects requests and blocks patterns that look like an attack, before they reach your code.

The padlock explained plainly: what a certificate actually verifies, what it encrypts, and the questions it was never built to answer.