Hosting Terms
What is 301 Redirect?
301 Redirect in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.
Straight answer first
A 301 redirect forwards one web address to another for good, carrying visitors along and passing search-ranking signals to the new destination.
The sections below open it up properly — how it works, why a site owner should care, and a concrete example of it doing its job.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
100+
Terms on the shelf
2 min
Typical read
Plain
English, we promise
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It is the machinery underneath every clean migration — a change of domain, a move to HTTPS, a restructured site — and mapping page to page preserves the value of deep links that a blanket redirect to the homepage simply throws away.
Its temporary cousin, the 302, deliberately holds off and passes nothing on. Choosing between them is choosing what you are telling search engines about how permanent the move really is.
The picture that makes 301 Redirect stick
A permanent redirection at the post office. Letters follow you automatically, and over the months the senders update their own address books, which only happens because you declared the move permanent rather than temporary.
Comparisons simplify, naturally — but this one holds together well enough to reason with, and reasoning is the whole point of a glossary.
Why this one is worth knowing
Handling redirects well is the difference between a migration that keeps years of search standing and one that starts again from nothing. Old redirects are infrastructure with a half-life measured in decades, not scaffolding you take down after launch week.
That is the test for any technical term, incidentally — not 'do I understand it fully' but 'do I know when it is the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now do.
One concrete example
Merging two overlapping articles, an editor 301s the weaker address to the stronger one. Within weeks the links and rankings pointing at both have consolidated onto the page that survived.
Multiply that example by every website on the internet and you have the concept's entire job description in one go.
The Hosting Seller angle
You will meet it in the control panel and occasionally in a support conversation, usually already set the right way. If this term made sense, the natural next reads are HTTP Status Codes, 404 Error, .htaccess and Domain Name.
Order an annual plan and the first year of your domain registration is on the house.
A glossary written by the people on the counter
Every confusing term in hosting turns into a support ticket sooner or later, so we defined the hundred most common ones properly, once, in the plain English we would use across the counter.
SSL comes free with every plan and reissues itself before it lapses, so nobody has to diary the padlock.
- 100+ terms, all in plain English
- Everyday comparisons and real examples
- Related concepts linked together
- Written by the people on the desk
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
Linked, never siloed
Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.
One term, fully landed
301 Redirect defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
Honest about what to skip
Most terms are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and the glossary says which is which.
Pictures that stick
Each concept gets a comparison you will still remember at the moment you actually need it.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find it in your own account
The quickest way to learn a hosting term is to find it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading about it.
- 2
Check what the defaults are
Confirm how your account has this set. It is usually right by default here, and now you will know rather than guess.
- 3
Follow the terms next door
Concepts travel in packs — HTTP Status Codes, 404 Error and .htaccess finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- A free SSL certificate on every plan, reissued before it lapses
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
How long before a 301 takes proper effect in search?
Crawlers notice it quickly, while the consolidation of signals plays out over several weeks. Keep the redirect in place permanently regardless, because links on other people's sites never fully update and that legacy traffic keeps converting indefinitely.
Do redirect chains really matter?
They do. Every hop adds delay and thins the signal, so A to B to C should be flattened until A points straight at C. Sites that have migrated more than once accumulate these chains, and an annual audit repays the hour handsomely.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
Is there a refund if it does not suit?
Yes — thirty days. Put the hosting through real work, and if it is not right, ask for the money back and you get it; there is no retention script to survive first. Domain registrations are the one carve-out, because registries take that fee the moment the name is placed.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
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