Running & Maintaining a Site
Publishing is the short part; keeping something working is the long one. This category covers the operational vocabulary: uptime monitoring and what a 99.9 per cent guarantee really allows in a month, the difference between a robot checking your page on a schedule and measurement from real visitors' browsers, staging against production, and the two silent failures that take more sites down than anything else — a domain that quietly expired and a certificate that did not renew. It also covers moving a site without losing its addresses, auditing what you have published, and the economics: egress is the metered thing, so a popular file costs in proportion to its size times its downloads, which is worth understanding before it happens rather than after.
33 terms in this category
Broken Link
A link that points at a page or file which is no longer there, so the visitor gets an error instead of the thing they clicked for. Most of the time the server answers with a 404.
Capacity Planning
Working out ahead of time how much storage, transfer and headroom a site will need, and checking that against what the plan allows. For static hosting it is mostly arithmetic.
Certificate Renewal
Replacing a site's TLS certificate before it expires. On most modern hosting this happens automatically and you never think about it — but not on all of it, and an expired certificate blocks every visitor with a full-page browser warning.
Content Audit
A systematic review of everything you have published: what each page is, when it was last touched, whether it is still accurate, and whether anyone reads it. The output is a list with a decision recorded against every row.
Cost per Gigabyte
The unit price a host charges for a gigabyte of something — most often storage held for a month, or data transferred out to visitors. The two are separate numbers and are easy to confuse.
Data Export
Getting your content, settings and statistics out of a service in a form something else can read. It is the practical test of how portable an account really is.
Deployment Log
The record of what was published, by whom and when, alongside the output of the build that produced it. It is the first thing to read when a site was fine yesterday and is not today.
Disaster Recovery
The plan for getting a site back after something has genuinely broken — an account lost, a provider gone, files deleted. It is the written answer to the question of who does what, in which order, and from which copy.
Domain Expiry
The date a domain registration runs out. Missing it takes the site and its email offline immediately, and recovering the name gets progressively harder and more expensive over the weeks that follow.
Domain Transfer
Moving a domain's registration from one registrar to another, while keeping the name itself. It is a deliberate, slow process with an authorisation code, a lock and several waiting periods built in to stop domains being stolen.
Downtime
Any period in which a site does not do its job for the people trying to use it. That includes a page that loads but is broken, not only a server that refuses to answer.
Egress Fee
A charge for data leaving a provider's network — the bytes sent out to visitors when they load your pages or download your files. Data coming in the other direction is usually free.
Environment Variable
A named value supplied to a program from outside its code, so the same code can behave differently in different places. On a static site the warning matters more than the definition: there is no server, so nothing you put in the page is secret.
Error Monitoring
Collecting the failures a site produces in real use — script errors in visitors' browsers, missing files, failed requests — so they get noticed without anyone reporting them. It answers what is going wrong, not whether the site is up.
Incident Response
What you do between noticing that something is broken and confirming it is fixed. For a small site it is a short, boring sequence agreed in advance so that nobody has to invent one under pressure.
Log Retention
How long you keep request logs, deployment records and visitor data before deleting them or rolling them up. It is a decision worth making deliberately rather than a default to leave alone.
Maintenance Page
A single holding page shown in place of a site while work is being done on it. Done properly it returns a 503 status with a Retry-After header, so search engines treat the pause as temporary rather than as a site that has gone.
Production Environment
The live setup that real visitors reach — the address they type, the files they receive, the certificate and DNS behind them. Production is defined by who is looking at it, not by how it is built.
Real User Monitoring
Measuring speed and failures from inside the browsers of actual visitors, as they use the site. Usually shortened to RUM.
Redirect Map
A list of old URLs paired with the new addresses they should send visitors to. It is the record you keep when you move, rename or retire pages, so links that already exist in the world keep working.
Site Migration
Moving a site to a new host, a new domain, a new URL structure, or some combination of the three. The files are the easy part; the addresses are where the damage happens.
Smoke Test
A quick check after publishing that the obvious things still work. It is not thorough by design — its job is to catch the catastrophic failure in two minutes, not to find every bug.
Staging Environment
A complete, private copy of a site where changes are checked before they go live. For a static site it is simply the same files published at a second address that the public does not know about.
Status Page
A separate page that says whether a service is working and what is being done if it is not. Its whole value comes from being hosted away from the thing it reports on.
Synthetic Monitoring
Checking a site by having a robot request it on a schedule from fixed locations, whether or not anyone is visiting. The measurements are comparable because the conditions never change.
Takedown Workflow
The defined process a host follows when someone asks for published content to be removed. It covers who receives the request, how it is checked, what happens to the content, and what gets recorded.
Traffic Spike
A sudden, large rise in visitors or downloads over a short window — usually hours, sometimes minutes. It is what happens when a link is posted somewhere popular.
Uptime Guarantee
A provider's contractual promise about how much of the month its service will be available, with a penalty if it misses. The penalty is almost always a credit against your next bill, not compensation for what the outage cost you.
Uptime Monitoring
An outside service that requests your site on a schedule and tells you when it stops answering correctly. It exists so that you find out about an outage before your visitors have to tell you.
Uptime SLA Credit
Money a provider owes back when it misses the availability it promised, usually as a percentage of that month's fee. It is the enforcement mechanism behind an availability promise, and you normally have to claim it.
Vendor Lock-In
The cost and difficulty of moving away from a supplier once you are on it. With web hosting it is rarely the files that trap you — it is everything wrapped around them.
Web Archive
A stored copy of a web page or site as it existed at a particular moment, kept so it can still be read after the original changes or disappears. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the best known one.
Website Backup
A copy of everything a site is made of, kept somewhere the live site cannot take down with it. For a static site that means the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images and any data files, held outside the account that serves them.