The words your web developer uses, explained properly
Nobody wants to admit in a meeting that they do not know what hosting is. So people nod, agree to things, and find out later what they agreed to. This is every term you are likely to hear, in ordinary language, with what each one should cost and which ones must be in your name.
One picture that makes the rest make sense
Think of it as a shop. The domain is your street address. The hosting is the shop space you rent. The website is the shop you build inside it. SSL is the lock on the door. SEO is being listed in the directory so people can find the street.
You can change any one of these without losing the others. That matters more than it sounds, and it is the reason ownership is worth caring about.
Domain
What it is: your address on the internet. abnaim.com is a domain. You do not buy it outright — you rent it, usually a year at a time, from a registrar.
Why you care: this is the single most important thing you own. Lose the domain and every business card, every link, every search result points somewhere you no longer control.
Cost: roughly ৳1,200–1,800 a year for a .com. A .com.bd runs ৳1,200–2,500.
Must be in your name. Registered with your email address, paid with your card. Give your developer access if they need it. Never let it be registered in theirs.
Hosting
What it is: the computer that stores your website and serves it to visitors. It runs constantly, which is why it is rented rather than bought.
Why you care: hosting quality is the single biggest factor in how fast your site feels. A beautifully built site on cheap, overloaded hosting is a slow site, and no amount of design work fixes that.
Cost: ৳3,000–6,000 a year is fine for a normal business site. An online store needs more, around ৳8,000–15,000, because checkout pages cannot be cached and the server does real work on every load.
Also in your name. Same reason as the domain.
Which host?
I use Hostinger for most client sites and for a Bangladeshi news site I help manage. It is inexpensive, the control panel is straightforward enough for a non-technical owner, and support answers.
The honest caveat, from running a real site on it: their shared and entry-level plans strain under sudden traffic spikes. If your site gets a sudden rush — a news story, a campaign, a product launch — you want a VPS plan rather than shared, and to know that before the spike rather than during it. For a normal business site that never sees sudden surges, the cheaper plans are genuinely fine.
Disclosure: the Hostinger link above is an affiliate link. If you sign up through it I may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. I recommend it because I use it, and the caveat above is there because it is true.
DNS
What it is: the directory that connects your domain to your hosting. It is what tells the internet that yourcompany.com lives on that particular server.
Why you care: only really when you move hosts. Changes take a few hours to spread worldwide, which is why a developer says "give it 24 hours" after a migration. They are not stalling.
Cost: normally free, included with your domain or host.
SSL, and why the padlock matters
What it is: encryption between your visitor's browser and your site. It is what makes the address start https:// and shows a padlock.
Why you care: without it, browsers display a "Not secure" warning, and most people leave immediately. If you take any information at all — even a contact form — it is not optional.
Cost: free. Let's Encrypt provides certificates at no charge and every decent host supports it in one click. If a quote has a line charging you thousands of taka a year for SSL on an ordinary business site, question it. Paid certificates exist for specific corporate situations; a five-page company site is not one.
CMS, and what WordPress actually is
What it is: a Content Management System — software that lets you change your own website without knowing how to code. WordPress is the most widely used one in the world.
Why you care: without a CMS, every text change means paying a developer. With one, you log in and edit it yourself. This is the difference between owning a website and renting one from whoever built it.
Cost: WordPress itself is free. You pay for the building, not the software.
Theme
What it is: the design layer. It controls how the site looks without changing what is written on it.
Why you care: most business sites use a purchased theme configured to fit the brand, and there is nothing wrong with that. Be wary only of "custom design" on a quote under ৳40,000 — that usually means a theme with the colours changed. Either is fine; being told the wrong one is not.
Cost: ৳2,000–8,000 for a good premium theme, sometimes renewing yearly.
Plugin
What it is: an add-on that gives WordPress a new ability — a contact form, a booking system, a shop.
Why you care: every plugin is more code running on every page load, and every one is a thing that can break or become a security hole. Twenty-five plugins where twelve would do is a genuinely common cause of a slow, fragile site. Fewer is better.
Cost: many are free. Paid ones typically ৳2,000–8,000 a year each.
Page builder, Elementor
What it is: a visual editor that lets you drag sections around instead of writing code. Elementor is the most common.
Why you care: it makes the site easy for you to edit later, which is the point. It can also make sites heavy if used carelessly, which is why builder sites often need speed work.
WooCommerce
What it is: the plugin that turns a WordPress site into a shop — products, cart, checkout, orders.
Why you care: it is the standard choice for selling online from a WordPress site in Bangladesh, mostly because local payment gateway support is better than the alternatives.
Cost: free itself; the extensions and the build are what you pay for.
SEO
What it is: Search Engine Optimisation — the work of making your site appear when people search for what you sell.
Why you care: it is the difference between a website that sits there and one that brings you enquiries.
What it actually involves: giving each service its own page, writing in the words your customers use rather than industry language, a site that loads quickly on a phone, and publishing genuinely useful pages over time. That is most of it.
What it is not: paying Google. Normal results cannot be bought. Anyone guaranteeing you the top spot is selling something they do not control.
Indexing
What it is: whether Google has found and stored your pages. A page that is not indexed cannot appear in results at all.
How to check: search site:yourcompany.com in Google. If nothing comes back, you have a bigger problem than ranking. I wrote about the seven usual reasons separately.
Sitemap
What it is: a file listing all your pages, which you hand to Google so it does not have to guess.
Why you care: you do not, day to day. Just make sure your developer has submitted it in Search Console.
The three Google tools, which are not the same thing
| Tool | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Search Console | What people searched before they found you, and any technical problems Google sees. Free. |
| Analytics | What visitors did once they arrived — pages viewed, how long they stayed. Free. |
| Business Profile | Your listing on Google Maps and in local results. Free, and the highest-return twenty minutes for a local business. |
All three are free. All three should be set up in your Google account, not your developer's.
Backup
What it is: a copy of your site that can be restored if something breaks.
Why you care: the question is not whether you have backups. It is where they are stored and whether anyone has ever tested restoring one. A backup on the same server that fails is not a backup. Ask both questions.
Staging
What it is: a private copy of your site where changes are tested before going live.
Why you care: this is the difference between a professional and an amateur arrangement. Updates applied straight to a live site is how a business discovers its checkout is broken from a customer's phone call.
Cache
What it is: a saved copy of a page, served instantly instead of rebuilt each time.
Why you care: it makes sites much faster. Two things to know: it is why you sometimes cannot see a change you just made (clear the cache), and cart and checkout pages cannot be cached at all, which is why stores need better hosting.
Core Web Vitals
What it is: Google's measurements of how a page feels to a real visitor — how fast the main content appears, whether things jump around while loading, how quickly it responds to a tap.
Why you care: it affects both your ranking and whether people stay. Test at PageSpeed Insights, and look at the mobile score. Desktop flatters nearly every site.
What you should own, and what your developer just manages
| Thing | Whose account |
|---|---|
| Domain | Yours. Always |
| Hosting | Yours. Always |
| Google Search Console | Yours, developer added as a user |
| Google Analytics | Yours, developer added as a user |
| Google Business Profile | Yours. Never anyone else's |
| WordPress admin login | Yours, developer has their own separate account |
| Theme and plugin licences | Either — but know which, and what renews |
If a developer resists any row in that table, that is the useful information. It costs them nothing to do it correctly.
Questions people ask
Do I need to understand all of this?
No. You need to recognise the words well enough to ask one follow-up question, and you need to know which things belong in your name. That is the whole job.
My developer says I don't need to worry about the domain. Should I?
Yes. Not because they are dishonest — usually it is just convenience. But convenience becomes a problem the day you want to change developer, and it is much easier to fix now than then.
What if all of this is already in someone else's name?
It is usually recoverable. Domains can be transferred, hosting can be migrated, Google properties can be reclaimed. Start by asking politely. Most developers will simply hand it over.
Which of these costs the most?
Over five years, hosting and the domain add up to less than a single rebuild. The expensive thing is always the site that has to be built twice.
Want someone to translate a quote you've received?
Send it over. I'll tell you in plain language what it includes, what it leaves out, and what to ask — whether or not you end up working with me.