Hosting Terms
What is Document Root?
What Document Root really means, with the jargon taken out — plus the example that makes it obvious.
Straight answer first
The document root is the folder a domain's web addresses map into — the boundary between your site's public files and everything else on the account.
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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public_html is the traditional root for the main domain, and every addon domain and subdomain gets one of its own. A file sitting at root/blog/post.html is served as domain.com/blog/post.html, and the mapping really is that literal.
Anything above the root is invisible to the web, which makes 'above the root' the right home for secrets, backup files and anything else the internet has no business fetching.
The everyday comparison
The shop floor against the stockroom. Customers browse whatever you put out on the floor, and the office and the safe upstairs exist without any route leading a customer to them.
Comparisons simplify, naturally — but this one holds together well enough to reason with, and reasoning is the whole point of a glossary.
Why it matters if you run a site
Half the practical confusion in hosting is document-root confusion: uploads landing in the wrong folder, addon domains nested inside one another, or a configuration file with passwords in it left out on the shop floor.
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.
Document Root out in the open
A developer keeps site backups in /home/account/backups, outside public_html, because a backup inside the root would be one lucky guess in a browser away from being downloaded by a stranger.
Perfectly ordinary once you have seen it, which is rather the point: most hosting concepts are simple machinery wearing an intimidating name.
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 FTP, Addon Domain, Subdomain and .htaccess.
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.
Backups run every day on every plan, and putting a file or a database back takes one click from the panel.
- 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
One term, fully landed
Document Root defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
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.
Grounded in real kit
Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.
The next reads, mapped
Read on into FTP and Addon Domain — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.
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 — FTP, Addon Domain and Subdomain finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Why does my uploaded file not show up on the site?
It landed outside the document root, or inside the root belonging to a different domain on the same account. Check where that domain's root actually points — the panel lists it per domain — and put the file underneath that path.
Which files belong outside the document root?
Anything the web has no business serving: backups, log files, spare copies of configuration, private scripts, material uploaded but not yet published. If a guessed address could fetch it and that would be bad news, it belongs upstairs.
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.
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.
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.
What happens to my files if I leave?
The site and the files stay yours. Pull a full backup from the panel whenever you like, before or during cancellation. Domains remain registered in your name for the term you paid for and can move to any registrar once the standard 60-day window has passed.
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.
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