Hosting Terms
What is DNS?
What DNS really means, with the jargon taken out — plus the example that makes it obvious.
Straight answer first
DNS is the internet's directory service, turning the names people can remember into the numeric addresses and the routing instructions that machines insist on.
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
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Terms on the shelf
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Typical read
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A lookup walks down a chain of delegation: the root, then the servers for the ending, then your domain's own authoritative nameservers, whose records — A, CNAME, MX, TXT — say where the site, the mail and the verifications actually live.
Resolvers keep each answer for as long as its TTL says they may, which is the whole reason changes appear to 'propagate'. Old answers hang about in caches until their timers run out.
DNS (Domain Name System), by comparison
A trade directory consulted at extraordinary speed. Names go in, numbers come out, and everybody keeps their own printed copy that they only replace when the current one expires.
Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.
Why it matters if you run a site
Every service hanging off your domain — website, mail, verification tokens — is really just a DNS record. Learning to read the zone file turns 'the site is down' from a panic into a two-minute check.
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
Someone types example.com. The browser asks its resolver, the resolver walks the chain to the domain's nameservers, and back comes the A record with the hosting server's address, all inside a few milliseconds and cached for next time.
Perfectly ordinary once you have seen it, which is rather the point: most hosting concepts are simple machinery wearing an intimidating name.
How this turns up in your own account
On our hosting this largely looks after itself — the platform applies sensible defaults, and the panel hands you the controls when you want them. The concepts worth reading next: Nameserver, A Record, TTL and DNS Propagation.
Bring an existing site and we shift it across at no charge — usually inside 24 hours, with nothing going dark while we work.
A glossary written by the people on the counter
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.
What you pay on day one is what you pay at renewal, so the year-two invoice holds no surprises worth opening early.
- 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.
Linked, never siloed
Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.
Pictures that stick
Each concept gets a comparison you will still remember at the moment you actually need it.
One term, fully landed
DNS defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
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.
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 — Nameserver, A Record and TTL finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Who is actually running my DNS?
Whoever operates the nameservers your registrar delegates to — usually your host, which is our default once a domain points here, or a specialist DNS provider. The delegation set at the registrar is the only thing that decides it.
Is DNS a single point of failure for my site?
It was built to avoid being one: several nameservers, caching all over the world, and TTLs that keep answers alive. The fragility in practice is human — wrong records, botched delegations and forgotten entries cause nearly every so-called DNS outage.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
Can I bring a domain I already own?
Yes, and transfers in are routine. Unlock the name at your present registrar, collect the auth code, then start the transfer from your client area. Whatever registration time is left comes across with it, and DNS keeps answering the whole way through.
What if the site outgrows the plan I bought?
You move up in place. Plan changes are made from the client area with no migration and no downtime, and the range runs from small shared accounts through VPS to whole dedicated servers. Growing becomes a line change on your account rather than a hunt for a new host.
Are backups included, and can I put one back myself?
A backup is taken daily on every plan, and the restore is yours to run from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both, at three in the morning without waiting on a ticket. Keeping your own copy offsite as well is never a bad habit, and nothing here stops you.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
Read next
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