How websites actually work: hosting, domains and SSL.
The Blog Host explains what sits behind the URL: where websites live, how names find them, and what the little padlock does and does not tell you. We try to skip the jargon walls and the sales pitch.
Where do you want to start?
I need a site
Not sure which hosting type fits? Answer five questions and get a straight recommendation.
MigrateI'm moving hosts
A step-by-step migration checklist you can tick off, with the gotchas people usually learn the hard way.
Fix itSomething's broken
A symptom-first troubleshooting guide: blank page, 500 error, certificate warning, email bouncing.
LearnI'm just curious
A searchable glossary of hosting terms.
Interactive tools
Hosting Type Quiz
Shared, VPS, cloud or managed WordPress? Find the fit.
Domain Name Brainstormer
Generate name ideas from your keywords, with a TLD guide.
Page Weight Calculator
Estimate load time from page size and connection speed.
Storage and Bandwidth Estimator
How much hosting does your site actually need?
Certificate Renewal Planner
Work out when to renew so you never see an expiry warning.
Uptime Math
What 99.9% really means in minutes of downtime.
Series
Host Talk
27 explainers: what happens when you type a URL, why email is hard, how caching works.
SeriesHosting Autopsy
36 composite case studies of outages and misconfigurations, and the checks that would have caught them.
SeriesMyth or Fact
46 hosting claims, checked one by one.
SeriesBehind the Rack
Power, cooling, networks and storage inside a data centre.
SeriesDomain Hall of Fame
Choosing, buying and keeping a domain name.
SeriesHosting Through the Years
From one computer at CERN to the cloud.
Reference shelf
Glossary
More than 180 terms, searchable.
DNS Record Cheat Sheet
A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and friends.
HTTP Status Codes
What each code means and what to check.
SSL File Formats
PEM, DER, PFX, CRT, KEY: untangled.
Hosting Claims Decoder
Sales-page phrases, translated.
Migration Checklist
Tick-box list, saved in your browser.
What this site is
The Blog Host is a collection of guides, tools and stories about the machinery behind websites. Think of it as a well-organised notebook from someone who has spent years answering the same questions. It covers where sites are stored, how names find them, how encryption works, how email gets delivered, and why things sometimes break at the worst moment.
You do not need technical background to use it. If a page uses a term you do not know, the glossary will help. If you do have the background, the series and reference pages are meant to be quick to scan and accurate.
Where to begin
If you are choosing hosting, take the quiz, then read Choosing a Host. If you are about to move a site, print the migration checklist. If something has already gone wrong, the troubleshooting guide starts from the symptom. If you just like knowing how things work, start with what happens when you type a URL.
A note about examples
Where we use a story or a case, it is marked as a composite written by the editors. Real reader stories go through the submission page and are labeled as such.
Ask the Host
Got a question about hosting, domains or certificates? Send it in and it may be answered publicly. See Ask the Host, read The Host's Casebook, or submit your own story.