Glossary Entry
What is Apache?
What Apache actually means, buzzwords removed — with the example that makes it land.
The short answer
Apache is the long-running open-source web server whose conventions, .htaccess above all, still shape how shared hosting works.
What follows: the longer explanation, a picture that holds, the practical stakes, and the places you will genuinely meet it.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
100+
Terms in the jargon buster
2 min
Average read time
Plain
English throughout
24/7
People, if you get stuck
Modules plus configuration you can set folder by folder are what made it the shared hosting standard for decades. The catch is the process model, which grows expensive under heavy concurrency, where nginx's event-driven design pulls ahead.
Modern stacks tend to combine both ideas. Our own choice, LiteSpeed, keeps Apache compatibility including .htaccess but serves through an event-driven engine underneath, which is a deliberate refusal to take a side.
Apache, by way of an analogy
That old workhorse van every mechanic in town can still put right. Not the fastest thing on the motorway, but parts turn up anywhere and everybody already knows how it works.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Why it matters to a site owner
Learning Apache is learning hosting. Everything it established — htaccess recipes, rewrite rules, virtual hosts — became the vocabulary every tutorial is written in, and compatible servers such as LiteSpeed work hard to keep speaking it.
That, incidentally, is the bar for any technical term — not 'could I lecture on it' but 'would I recognise it as the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now would.
Apache out in the open
Take the .htaccess rules from a migration guide written for Apache years ago and they run on our LiteSpeed servers with no edits at all. Twenty years of accumulated recipes stay usable because of that compatibility.
Entirely unremarkable once you have seen it — which is the point: most hosting ideas are plain machinery behind an intimidating label.
How Hosting & Domains deals with it
Here it largely looks after itself, since the defaults are sensible and the panel puts the controls within reach the moment you want them. Read on: Nginx, LiteSpeed, .htaccess and PHP.
The rate you register at is the rate you renew at, so year two costs precisely what year one did — nothing lying in wait on the invoice.
Unexplained jargon slows everybody down
An unexplained piece of jargon is, to us, a service defect. This is the support team's collected translations, published where a search engine can hand them over on our behalf.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier, the smallest plan included — that is the floor here, not an upgrade.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
This term, properly landed
Apache defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Clear about how deep to go
Most of these are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and every entry says which it is.
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this idea sits — a definition turns into understanding the moment it attaches to your own site.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
Look at how your account has it configured. Nine times in ten the default is right, and a check turns the guess into certainty.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — Nginx, LiteSpeed and .htaccess finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- Staging copies for trying a change before it goes live
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Apache or nginx — which should I prefer?
Each is strong in a different place: Apache in flexibility and the .htaccess ecosystem, nginx in how cheaply it holds thousands of connections open. The honest answer for most owners is 'whichever your host runs competently', and LiteSpeed is how we answer it.
Does shared hosting ever put me in front of Apache itself?
Only through .htaccess and the panel's settings, since the server itself is maintained for you. That thin but genuinely powerful surface is meant to be everything a shared hosting customer ever needs to reach.
Do plans include copies I can restore myself?
Yes — every plan gets a daily copy, and the restore runs from your panel in minutes: files, databases or both, at three in the morning with no ticket queue in the way. Keeping a further copy offsite is still a sound habit, and nothing here stops you.
Can more than one website run on a single plan?
From the Turbo tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own name, mailboxes and certificate, inside one account. If the extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, look at reseller hosting instead: it keeps each one properly walled off.
Keep reading
Nginx
Nginx is the event-driven web server built for concurrency, holding thousands of simultaneous connections o…
LiteSpeed
LiteSpeed is a high-performance web server that reads Apache configuration and carries a cache of its own, …
How to Test Your Website Speed
A walkthrough to follow with the panel open in the next tab.
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