Hosting Terms
What is Git?
Git in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.
Straight answer first
Git is the version-control system that keeps a record of every change made to a set of code — the history, the undo button and the shared workspace behind modern development.
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
0
Terms left unexplained
100+
Definitions, cross-linked
Real
Examples from real kit
Free
To read, naturally
Each commit is a labelled snapshot of the whole project. Branches let two people work on different things at once without treading on each other, and any earlier state can be brought back in seconds. On the deployment side, keeping a clone on the server turns 'upload the changed files and hope' into a single pull.
In hosting terms, offering Git alongside SSH is what marks a plan out as developer-grade. Push-to-deploy and instant rollbacks replace the old routine of digging through FTP timestamps trying to work out what changed.
The picture that makes Git stick
A stock ledger that also runs backwards. Every version of every page is kept, any earlier day can be reopened exactly as it was, and several people can write in it at once without scribbling over each other's entries.
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
Even running a site single-handed, deploying through Git means every change can be undone and every change has a name against it. That is the difference between editing with a rope tied on and editing over open air.
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 bad release is undone with one checkout command. Thirty seconds from 'the site is broken' to 'the site is yesterday's working copy', which leaves you free to write the real fix without an audience.
Multiply that example by every website on the internet and you have the concept's entire job description in one go.
How this turns up in your own account
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 SSH, Staging Environment, Backup and WordPress.
SSL comes free with every plan and reissues itself before it lapses, so nobody has to diary the padlock.
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.
Real people answer the counter at any hour, including the awkward questions other hosts wave off as out of scope.
- 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 next reads, mapped
Read on into SSH and Staging Environment — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.
Honest about what to skip
Most terms are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and the glossary says which is which.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
Grounded in real kit
Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.
One term, fully landed
Git defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
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 — SSH, Staging Environment and Backup finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is Git only useful if you write code?
Code is where it feels most natural, but anyone who maintains a site's files gains from versioned deployments. The handful of commands that matter day to day — pull to update, checkout to undo — take an afternoon to learn and then repay that afternoon for years.
Can Git stand in for backups?
No. It tracks code, not your database and not your uploads. The full set is Git for code, database dumps for data, and a storage copy for media. Together they cover a site. Any one of them on its own covers about a third of it.
How do I read the mail when I am away from the desk?
Webmail opens in any browser, and every mailbox also speaks IMAP, POP and SMTP — so the mail app on your phone, the client on your desktop and webmail all show the same messages in the same order.
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.
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 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.
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
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