Glossary Entry
What is .htaccess?
.htaccess without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
.htaccess is the per-directory configuration file Apache reads on every request, and it is your lever for redirects, rewrites, security rules and headers with no access to the server config.
The rest of the page opens it up — the mechanics, why a site owner should care, and one concrete example of it at work.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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Jargon left undefined
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WordPress writes its permalink rules into it, redirects accumulate in it, and hardening measures such as blocking access to files, forcing HTTPS and setting headers are applied through it. Save the file and the rules are live, with no service to restart.
Its usefulness and its danger come from exactly the same reach. One character out of place puts the whole site on a 500 until it is reverted, and keeping a copy before you type anything is the entire safety procedure.
.htaccess, by way of an analogy
A set of house rules pinned up at the entrance to every corridor. Staff read them before serving anybody beyond that point, and a garbled sheet halts service until somebody rewrites it legibly.
Carry that picture with you and most documentation on the topic loses its mystery on a first read.
Why this term earns a page
No other control over server behaviour is as accessible to a site owner. Almost every redirect, security and caching recipe you will ever use is an .htaccess recipe, live in seconds and reversible just as quickly.
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.
One worked example
Fifty page-to-page redirects from a migration sit as fifty lines of .htaccess, versioned with the site, editable straight from File Manager, and in force the moment the file is written.
Scale that example across every website online and you have described the whole job of the concept in one stroke.
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: Apache, 301 Redirect, HTTP Status Codes and Document Root.
Hosted somewhere else already? We move the whole site at no charge, usually within 24 hours, and it goes on answering visitors throughout.
Why a hundred definitions were worth the writing
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
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
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.
This term, properly landed
.htaccess 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
Nothing teaches a hosting term faster than finding it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 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 — Apache, 301 Redirect and HTTP Status Codes finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
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Fitted to every plan
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- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
One .htaccess edit broke my whole site. Why so brittle?
Every request makes the server re-read that file, so a malformed line producing a 500 is the design working as intended. Restore your copy, or delete the lines you just added, and the site returns immediately. That same brittleness is why edits apply with no delay whatsoever.
Does .htaccess do anything on nginx?
No, and deliberately so, since nginx ignores it and the equivalent rules go into the server configuration instead. LiteSpeed, which is what runs here, treats .htaccess the Apache way, and that is one reason the ecosystem's recipes need no translation.
Where does the hardware physically sit?
The platform runs from a London datacentre with redundant power, cooling and several upstream carriers, with server-level caching in front that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites how the platform is built — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, restrained account density per machine — counts for far more than where it sits.
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
301 Redirect
A 301 redirect forwards one URL to another permanently, taking visitors across and passing search-ranking s…
HTTP Status Codes
HTTP status codes are the three-digit verdict stamped on every server response: 2xx succeeded, 3xx moved, 4…
How to Harden a Site With .htaccess
Step by step, with every snag flagged before you get to it.
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