Hosting Questions, Answered

Files whose name starts with a dot, like .htaccess, are hidden by default in most listings until you turn on show hidden files.

What an MX record does, why it is separate from your website's DNS, and where to find the ones set for your domain.

They decide who gets to answer questions about your domain — and changing them hands your whole domain to a different company.

PHP hit a problem it could not recover from — usually a broken .htaccess, a fatal error in the code, or a limit it ran straight into.

StackCP, provided through our hosting platform partner 20i, and reached from inside your client area.

The currency shown at checkout is the one you are billed in, then and for every renewal that follows.

It means the server tried, failed, and chose not to tell you why in public — the real reason is written to a log only you can read.

A declined renewal is common and rarely urgent — here is what generally happens next and the fastest way to sort it.

Broadly the same hosting a brochure site needs, but with less tolerance for the things that go wrong when you skip on any of it.

The total data your site sends to visitors each month. Most sites use far less of it than the number on the plan suggests.

The limit on how much of a site Google chooses to crawl. For most small sites it is not the bottleneck it sounds like.

The total storage on your hosting account, shared between your website files, database and email. Most sites need surprisingly little.

A header that tells browsers to never even attempt the insecure version of your site again, closing a gap a redirect alone leaves open.

KVM gives every VPS its own genuine virtual machine and kernel, isolated from every other guest on the same physical host.

OPcache keeps compiled PHP in memory instead of recompiling it on every request, and there is no good reason to leave it switched off.

Selling more resource than a plan technically has, on the assumption most accounts never use their full allowance at once.

The process manager that runs PHP behind most modern hosting stacks, and the reason your host almost certainly already uses it.

What the server is actually doing during that measurement, and how it differs from the total time a page takes to load.

What the wait before the first byte actually measures, and the short list of things that usually cause it.

A service that swaps your personal contact details on the public domain record for the registrar's own, so spam and cold callers reach them instead.

A record that restricts which certificate authorities are allowed to issue an SSL certificate for your domain at all.

A line in the page head that tells search engines which of several similar URLs is the one that should actually be indexed.

The number of seconds a DNS answer is allowed to be cached before it has to be checked again, and why it decides how fast a change spreads.

A short string in front of every table name, mainly so more than one application can share the same database.