Glossary Entry
What is Git?
What Git actually means, buzzwords removed — with the example that makes it land.
The short answer
Git records every change made to a codebase: the full history, a rollback lever whenever you want one, and the shared workspace modern development takes for granted.
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
Under a name of your choosing, a commit freezes the entire project. Branches keep two people's work from tangling, and restoring an earlier state takes seconds. For deployment, keeping a clone on the server turns 'upload whichever files you think changed' into a single pull.
From the hosting side, Git sitting alongside SSH marks a plan built for developers. The ritual of comparing FTP timestamps to work out which files moved gives way to push-to-deploy and instant rollback.
A way to picture Git
A black box recorder you can wind backwards. Every state of the project is kept, any past moment can be reinstated exactly, and several people can write to it at once without erasing one another.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Where it touches your own site
Deploy with Git, even on your own, and every change becomes both reversible and traceable. It is the difference between working with the harness clipped on and working without.
Nobody expects you to work at this layer daily. The aim is recognising it when it explains something — and that moment is exactly when this page pays for itself.
How it turns up day to day
One checkout undoes a bad release. In half a minute 'production is broken' becomes 'production is yesterday's good build', and the proper fix then gets written with nobody watching.
Scale that example across every website online and you have described the whole job of the concept in one stroke.
Where it sits inside your own account
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are SSH, Staging Environment, Backup and WordPress.
A free SSL certificate comes with every plan and reissues itself before the old one lapses — the padlock is never yours to diarise.
Unexplained jargon slows everybody down
Sooner or later every confusing hosting term turns into a support ticket, so we defined the hundred commonest ones properly — once, in the same plain English we use with customers.
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.
- 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
The next step, drawn out
Carry on into SSH and Staging Environment — ideas rarely travel alone, so the neighbours are linked in.
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.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
This term, properly landed
Git defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
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 — SSH, Staging Environment and Backup finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- The name's first year included when you order annually
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Is Git useful if you never write code?
It suits code best, but versioned deploys help anybody who owns a site's files. The handful of everyday commands, pull to update and checkout to step back, take an afternoon to learn and keep repaying that afternoon for years.
Can Git take the place of backups?
It cannot. Git holds your code and knows nothing of your database or your uploads. Proper cover means Git for the codebase, dumps for the data, and an off-server copy of the media. Together they protect the site; separately each covers about a third of it.
How do I read my mail away from my desk?
Webmail runs in any browser, and every mailbox also speaks IMAP, POP and SMTP — so the app on your phone, the client on your desk and webmail stay in step, showing the same messages in the same state.
Is there a safe place to try changes?
Yes — plans with staging let you copy the live site, work on the copy, then publish it once it behaves. That turns 'hope the update works' into 'know it works' before a single customer meets it.
Keep reading
WordPress
WordPress is the open-source platform behind roughly four in ten websites, and the default answer for anybo…
Staging Environment
A staging environment is a private duplicate of your live site where changes get tried out before any visit…
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