Hosting Terms
What is CDN?
CDN in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.
Straight answer first
A CDN keeps copies of your site's assets on servers around the world, so each visitor is served from the nearest one instead of from your origin.
Below: the fuller explanation, a picture that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you will actually run into it.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
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Distance costs time. An edge node a continent closer cuts the round trip for images, scripts, stylesheets and sometimes whole pages. Most CDN providers bundle security work alongside the delivery job, adding a WAF and soaking up floods of traffic.
How much it is worth depends on where your audience is. A worldwide readership gains a great deal; a single-country site already on well-placed hosting gains rather less. Measure before you buy in.
The everyday comparison
Regional depots for a mail-order business. Orders go out from the depot nearest the customer instead of from one warehouse at the far end of the country, and head office only handles what the depots do not stock.
Comparisons simplify, naturally — but this one holds together well enough to reason with, and reasoning is the whole point of a glossary.
What it means for your own site
For a spread-out audience, a CDN is the largest latency lever after caching itself. It also joins your purge routine the day you adopt it, because a stale copy at the edge is one more place your change has not reached yet.
You do not need to work at this layer every day. You need to recognise it when it explains something, which is exactly the moment this page earns its keep.
What it looks like day to day
A tutorial site with readers everywhere serves its images from local edges. The visitor in Sydney gets assets from Sydney rather than waiting on a round trip to a European origin.
Multiply that example by every website on the internet and you have the concept's entire job description in one go.
Where you will meet it on our platform
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 Cache, DDoS Attack, Bandwidth and Nginx.
Mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan, never an add-on sold back to you at checkout.
Unexplained jargon is bad service
We treat unexplained jargon as a service failure. This glossary is the support desk's accumulated translations, published where a search engine can hand them out for us.
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
Grounded in real kit
Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.
One term, fully landed
CDN defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
The next reads, mapped
Read on into Cache and DDoS Attack — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
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
Open the control panel and find where this concept lives — seeing it attached to your own site is what turns a definition into understanding.
- 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 — Cache, DDoS Attack and Bandwidth finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Does every website need a CDN?
No. A site with a UK audience on good European hosting gains very little from one. Adopt it when your visitors are geographically spread, when you serve a lot of heavy static files, or when you want the security features that come bundled. Skip it when measurement says your latency is already local.
Should I buy a CDN or better hosting first?
Hosting and caching first, every time. A CDN speeds up delivery of whatever your origin produces; it cannot make a slow origin produce faster. Get the origin quick, then put a CDN in front of it, and the two compound.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
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.
Who actually runs the company?
Hosting Seller is a trading name of Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales — a real business with a public record and terms published under English law. Looking that up is worth doing about any host before you hand over your domain.
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.
Read next
DDoS Attack
A DDoS attack floods a target with traffic from thousands of sources at once, trying to use up its capacity…
Cache
A cache keeps the result of expensive work ready to hand out again — pages, query results and assets served…
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WordPress Hosting
WordPress looked after for you — LiteSpeed caching, staging copies and daily backups.
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