How Does Web Hosting Actually Work Behind the Scenes?

The DNS Resolution Chain: How Your Browser Finds the Server

Every visit to a website begins with a process that most users never see: the DNS resolution chain that translates a human-readable domain name like hostingcaptain.com into the numeric IP address — such as 192.0.2.42 — that routers and switches actually use to deliver data packets across the internet. Understanding how how does web hosting work at this foundational layer demystifies the entire hosting stack: the domain name system (DNS) is not a single lookup but a hierarchical, multi-stage query that traverses recursive resolvers, root nameservers, top-level domain (TLD) nameservers, and authoritative nameservers before the browser even attempts to connect to the web server. Each stage in this chain introduces latency measured in milliseconds, and the efficiency of each step — cached versus uncached queries, the geographic proximity of each nameserver to the user, and the time-to-live (TTL) values configured in DNS records — collectively determines how long a visitor waits before the first byte of your website begins downloading. For a deeper foundation on the domain side of this equation, our guide to hosting and domain differences explains why domain registration and web hosting are distinct services that must be configured to work together.

When a user types a URL into their browser, the first stop is the operating system's local DNS cache, which stores recently resolved domain-to-IP mappings to avoid repeating lookups. If the cache has a non-expired entry for the requested domain — meaning the TTL specified by the domain's authoritative nameserver has not elapsed — the browser receives the IP address in under 1 millisecond and proceeds directly to establishing a TCP connection with the web server. If the local cache misses, the query is forwarded to the recursive DNS resolver, typically operated by the user's internet service provider (ISP) or a public resolver like Google's 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. The recursive resolver maintains its own cache with a broader population of resolved queries, and if the domain is in that cache, the response returns in 10 to 50 milliseconds — still imperceptibly fast. The complexity begins when both caches miss, triggering a full recursive resolution that starts at one of the thirteen root nameserver clusters operated by ICANN, descends to the TLD nameserver for the domain's extension (such as .com managed by Verisign), and finally queries the authoritative nameserver configured by the domain owner — often the same company that provides their web hosting or a dedicated DNS provider like Cloudflare. This full chain, when uncached, takes 50 to 200 milliseconds depending on network conditions, and every additional CNAME or DNAME record in the chain adds another round-trip. For a complete picture of how DNS underpins your website's accessibility, our explanation of DNS propagation covers why nameserver changes take time to propagate globally.

The authoritative nameserver's response delivers more than just an IP address; it returns a DNS record type — most commonly an A record for IPv4 addresses, an AAAA record for IPv6, or a CNAME record that aliases one domain to another — along with the critical TTL value that controls how long recursive resolvers and browsers may cache the result. A TTL of 300 seconds (5 minutes) means that traffic can be redirected to a different server within minutes, which is valuable for failover scenarios but increases DNS query volume. A TTL of 86400 seconds (24 hours) reduces query load but means that a server IP address change will take up to a full day to propagate to all visitors. DNS configuration lives at the intersection of hosting performance and operational flexibility, and the decisions made at this layer — choice of DNS provider, TTL strategy, and record architecture — directly affect how quickly and reliably visitors reach your web server.

The Web Server Software Stack: Apache, Nginx, and What Listens on Port 80/443

Once DNS resolution delivers the server's IP address to the browser, the next layer in how does web hosting work is the web server software — the program that listens on ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS), accepts incoming TCP connections, interprets the HTTP request, locates the requested resource on the server's filesystem or generates it dynamically, and sends the HTTP response back to the browser. The two dominant web server software packages in 2026 — Apache HTTP Server and Nginx — each implement this request-response cycle through fundamentally different architectural models that have direct consequences for hosting performance, resource consumption, and the types of websites each can serve efficiently. A domain name's role in this process is foundational — it is the human-readable identifier that the entire DNS and hosting chain is organized around, and MDN's guide provides an excellent technical overview of domain mechanics.

Apache, first released in 1995 and still powering roughly 30% of all websites, uses a process-based or thread-based concurrency model where each incoming connection is assigned to a dedicated worker process or thread. Under Apache's traditional prefork Multi-Processing Module (MPM), the server maintains a pool of worker processes, and each HTTP request occupies one worker for its entire duration — from TCP handshake through the full response delivery. This architecture is straightforward to understand and debug but places a hard ceiling on concurrency: a server with Apache prefork configured for 256 worker processes can handle exactly 256 simultaneous connections, and request number 257 will wait in the operating system's TCP backlog queue until a worker becomes available. Apache's event MPM, introduced later, partially addresses this by decoupling connection handling from request processing using non-blocking I/O, allowing a smaller pool of worker threads to handle a larger number of simultaneous connections — but the fundamental memory-per-connection overhead, while reduced, remains higher than Nginx's model. For shared hosting environments where hundreds of websites share a single server and no single site expects massive traffic bursts, Apache's mature ecosystem, extensive .htaccess support, and near-universal compatibility with hosting control panels like cPanel make it the industry default. Our shared hosting guide explains how Apache serves as the workhorse for multi-tenant hosting environments.

Nginx, created in 2004 by Igor Sysoev specifically to solve the C10k problem — handling ten thousand concurrent connections on a single server — uses an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking architecture that represents the modern standard for high-concurrency web serving. Instead of spawning a process or thread per connection, Nginx uses a small number of worker processes (typically one per CPU core), each of which uses an event loop to handle thousands of connections simultaneously by reacting to kernel-level notifications about which sockets are ready to read or write. A single Nginx worker can juggle tens of thousands of idle connections — visitors reading a page, waiting for a long-poll response, or holding a WebSocket open — while consuming only a few megabytes of RAM. This architectural efficiency is why Nginx powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites, why it serves as the reverse proxy and load balancer in front of nearly every major hosting platform's application servers, and why performance-focused hosting plans — particularly VPS and cloud hosting deployments — default to Nginx or Nginx-based configurations. For anyone exploring self-managed servers, our guide to explaining hosting to non-technical clients covers how to communicate the performance implications of server software choices in plain language.

The practical distinction between Apache and Nginx manifests most clearly under load. A moderately provisioned server running Apache with prefork MPM might handle 500 simultaneous visitors before response times degrade, while the same server running Nginx can serve 5,000 to 10,000 simultaneous visitors with stable latency. This is not a minor optimization; it is the difference between a server that survives a Reddit front-page traffic spike and one that collapses under the load, producing connection timeouts and 503 errors that drive visitors away permanently. Modern hosting deployments frequently combine both servers in a layered architecture: Nginx at the edge handling client connections, TLS termination, static file serving, and request buffering — its areas of maximum advantage — with Apache or PHP-FPM behind it handling dynamic content generation for applications like WordPress that rely on .htaccess directives and Apache-specific modules. This Nginx-as-reverse-proxy configuration delivers the best of both architectures and is the default recommendation for high-traffic WordPress hosting in 2026. If you are curious about the physical servers that run this software, our web server explainer covers the hardware and operating system layers in accessible terms.

How Static vs. Dynamic Content Changes the Hosting Equation

At the most fundamental level, every website serves one of two types of content — static or dynamic — and this distinction determines which hosting architecture is appropriate, how server resources are consumed, and what performance profile visitors experience. Static content is delivered directly from the filesystem: HTML files, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript bundles, images, fonts, and videos that exist as complete, pre-built files on the server's storage. When a browser requests a static resource, the web server locates the file on disk — or, more commonly in 2026, in the operating system's filesystem cache or in-memory page cache — and streams its bytes to the client with minimal processing. Dynamic content, in contrast, does not exist as a pre-built file; each request triggers the execution of server-side code — PHP for WordPress, Python for Django, Ruby for Rails, Node.js for Express, or any of dozens of other languages and frameworks — that queries databases, evaluates business logic, constructs HTML responses on the fly, and returns a result unique to that specific request from that specific user at that specific moment. This architectural difference is the axis on which almost every hosting decision turns.

Static content serving is computationally trivial: Nginx can serve over 100,000 static file requests per second from a single modern CPU core, saturating a 10 Gbps network link before the CPU reaches 50% utilization. The performance of static content delivery is limited by storage I/O throughput (NVMe SSDs delivering 3,000 to 7,000 MB/s sequential read speed directly translate into faster file delivery), network bandwidth, and geographic distance between the server and the visitor. This is why content delivery networks (CDNs) — distributed networks of edge servers that cache static content in data centers close to end users — are among the most impactful performance investments a website can make: caching static assets at 300 edge locations worldwide can reduce latency from 150 milliseconds (serving from a single origin server halfway around the world) to 15 milliseconds (serving from the edge node in the visitor's city). For further reading on the topic, our CDN guide explains when a CDN is worth the investment and when it is overkill for your traffic profile.

Dynamic content, by contrast, places a heavy and variable load on server CPU, RAM, and database I/O. A single WordPress page request in a default installation without caching triggers 20 to 80 database queries — fetching the post content, author metadata, category listings, tag associations, comment threads, sidebar widget configurations, navigation menu structures, and plugin-generated data — assembles them into PHP data structures, applies theme template logic and filter hooks, and renders the final HTML string. This chain can consume 50 to 200 milliseconds of CPU time and generate substantial database query load. When 100 visitors request this same page simultaneously, the CPU and database I/O consumption multiplies accordingly, and without caching — which stores the fully rendered HTML output and serves it as a static file to subsequent visitors — a modest shared hosting plan buckles under load that a properly cached configuration would handle effortlessly. The concept of caching as a bridge between dynamic content generation and static-level performance is so central to modern hosting that it warrants its own detailed examination, which follows in the next section.

Caching: The Performance Layer That Makes Modern Hosting Viable

Caching is not an optional optimization in how does web hosting work for production websites; it is the architectural layer that makes dynamic content economically deliverable at scale. Without caching, every WordPress page view, every e-commerce product listing, and every SaaS dashboard widget would require a full server-side code execution cycle, imposing a CPU and database query cost that multiplies linearly with traffic and pushes even moderate-traffic websites onto hosting tiers far more expensive than they actually need. With caching, the heavy computational work of content generation is performed once — when the first visitor requests a page after a cache invalidation event — and every subsequent visitor receives a pre-computed copy served at static-content speeds. The following subsections examine each caching layer in the modern hosting stack.

Page Caching: The Highest-Impact Optimization for Dynamic Sites

Page caching stores the fully rendered HTML output of a dynamic page and serves it directly to subsequent visitors without invoking PHP, database queries, or theme logic. For a WordPress site, this means that after the first visit to a blog post generates the HTML — a process that might consume 150 milliseconds of CPU time and 40 database queries — the HTML is saved to disk or memory, and the next 10,000 visitors receive that pre-built file in under 10 milliseconds each. Page caching is the single highest-leverage performance improvement available to most websites, and the adoption rate among hosting providers — does the shared hosting plan include server-level page caching, or is it left to the user to install and configure a plugin — is one of the most important differentiators between budget hosting and performance-oriented hosting. Server-level page caching solutions like Nginx FastCGI cache, Apache mod_cache, or LiteSpeed's LSCache operate below the PHP layer, intercepting requests before they reach the application, and typically deliver 2 to 10 times faster cached response times than plugin-level page caching solutions because they avoid the overhead of loading the PHP interpreter entirely.

Opcode Caching: Eliminating PHP Compilation Overhead

PHP is an interpreted language: every time a PHP script executes — and WordPress involves dozens of PHP scripts per page view — the PHP engine must parse the human-readable source code and compile it into opcodes (bytecode) that the Zend Engine can execute. This parsing and compilation step is redundant if the source code has not changed, and opcode caching eliminates it by storing the compiled bytecode in shared memory so that repeated requests skip the parsing phase entirely. PHP's built-in OPcache extension, enabled by default in PHP 8.x, reduces PHP execution time by 30% to 70% depending on the complexity of the codebase, and any hosting environment that does not have OPcache enabled and properly configured — with sufficient shared memory allocation to store the full bytecode footprint of the site — is leaving substantial performance on the table at no cost. For WordPress sites with 20+ active plugins, the opcode cache can hold over 100 MB of compiled bytecode, and a misconfigured OPcache that runs out of memory and continuously evicts and recompiles scripts produces a performance degradation pattern that is difficult to diagnose without server-level monitoring.

Object Caching: Reducing Database Query Volume

Object caching stores the results of expensive or frequently executed operations — database query results, API call responses, computed data structures — in a fast in-memory data store like Redis or Memcached. While page caching eliminates the need to run PHP at all for cached pages, object caching improves performance for uncached or partially cached pages by reducing the number and cost of database queries required to render them. A WordPress site with Redis object caching configured correctly can reduce its per-page database query count from 40 to 80 queries down to 5 to 15 queries, because frequently accessed data — WordPress options, user metadata, navigation menu structures, widget configurations — is served from memory in microseconds rather than from the database in milliseconds. Redis also provides the backend for WordPress transient storage, session management in multi-server deployments, and the locking mechanism that prevents cache stampede conditions when a popular page's cache expires and dozens of simultaneous requests would otherwise all attempt to regenerate it simultaneously.

Browser and CDN Caching: Pushing Content Closer to the User

The caching layers described above operate on the server; browser caching and CDN caching push cached content outward, reducing both the number of requests that reach the origin server and the network latency experienced by the visitor. Browser caching, controlled by HTTP headers like Cache-Control, ETag, and Expires, instructs the visitor's browser to store static assets — CSS files, JavaScript bundles, images, fonts — locally and reuse them on subsequent page views without requesting them from the server at all. A properly configured browser caching policy can reduce bandwidth consumption by 60% to 80% for repeat visitors. CDN caching extends this same principle globally: edge servers in data centers around the world store copies of cached pages and static assets, and visitors are routed to the geographically nearest edge node, reducing round-trip latency from potentially 200+ milliseconds to single-digit milliseconds for visitors in major metropolitan areas. The combination of server-level page caching, opcode caching, object caching, browser caching, and CDN caching creates a layered defense against server overload that, when configured correctly, enables a $10-per-month shared hosting plan to serve hundreds of thousands of monthly page views at speeds that feel instant to visitors — a result that would be technically impossible without caching at every layer.

The Database Layer: MySQL, MariaDB, and Persistent Data Storage

Every dynamic website — every WordPress blog, every e-commerce store, every forum, every SaaS application — stores its content, user accounts, settings, and relationships in a database. The database is the stateful core of the hosting stack: while web servers and PHP processes are stateless and can be scaled horizontally by adding more instances behind a load balancer, the database holds the canonical copy of all persistent data and must maintain consistency across all reads and writes. Understanding the database layer is essential to understanding how does web hosting work because database performance is the most common bottleneck in dynamic website hosting — and database failure, whether through corruption, resource exhaustion, or misconfiguration, is the most common cause of catastrophic website outages.

MySQL and its community-developed fork MariaDB dominate the shared and VPS hosting landscape, powering over 80% of all websites that use a relational database. Both systems store data in tables organized into databases — a typical WordPress installation uses 12 to 15 tables for core functionality, with plugins adding additional tables — and both use Structured Query Language (SQL) as the interface for reading, writing, updating, and deleting data. The database server process (mysqld) maintains the data files on disk, manages client connections from web applications, parses and optimizes SQL queries, executes them against the stored data, and returns results. A single MySQL instance on a shared hosting server typically hosts hundreds or thousands of individual databases — one per hosted website — and the database server's total resource consumption (CPU, RAM, disk I/O) is the aggregate of all queries from all websites on the server. This shared-resource model is why database-heavy websites on shared hosting can impact neighboring websites on the same server, and why hosting providers impose database query limits, connection limits, and storage quotas — to prevent any single tenant from degrading the database performance available to all others.

Database indexing is the single most impactful technical practice for query performance, and it is an area where underinvestment produces symptoms that website owners often misattribute to "slow hosting." An unindexed database table — such as a WordPress wp_postmeta table that stores custom field data for every post — must be scanned in its entirety (a full table scan) for every query that filters or sorts by a non-indexed column. A wp_postmeta table with 500,000 rows and no index on post_id will take 200 to 500 milliseconds to execute a query that, with the proper index, takes under 1 millisecond. Multiply this across every page view that queries post metadata — which is nearly every page view on a WordPress site — and database indexing becomes not a performance optimization but a structural requirement for any website with more than a few thousand database rows. For readers who want to understand database concepts without technical jargon, our MySQL explained simply guide provides an accessible introduction.

Server Hardware: What Actually Runs Your Website

Every layer of the hosting stack described above — DNS resolution, web server software, caching systems, and database servers — ultimately executes on physical hardware inside a data center. The physical server is a computer purpose-built for continuous operation in a rack-mounted environment, with redundant power supplies, enterprise-grade CPUs (typically Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC), error-correcting (ECC) RAM that can detect and correct single-bit memory errors without crashing, NVMe SSDs or SAS hard drives in RAID arrays for redundant storage, and multiple 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps network interfaces. Understanding the hardware layer in the context of how does web hosting work demystifies the performance differences between hosting tiers and explains why a $5-per-month plan and a $500-per-month plan can both be honestly described as "web hosting" while delivering vastly different capabilities.

The central processing unit (CPU) is the server's engine. Shared hosting plans allocate CPU time in slices: your website's processes — Apache workers, PHP-FPM pools, MySQL query threads — compete with all other tenants on the server for CPU cycles, and when the server's aggregate CPU utilization approaches 100%, every website on that server experiences slower response times. VPS hosting, in contrast, allocates dedicated virtual CPU cores that are reserved for your virtual machine; no other tenant's processes can consume them. The practical difference is predictability: a VPS with 2 dedicated vCPUs will always have 2 vCPUs of processing power available, while a shared hosting plan on the same physical hardware might have access to 8 vCPUs of burst capacity during low-traffic periods but see that drop to effectively 0.2 vCPUs during peak hours when neighboring tenants are busy. Cloud hosting takes this further by abstracting the CPU into a pool of compute capacity that can be scaled up or down on demand, with billing tied to actual consumption rather than fixed allocation. For a complete breakdown of these tiers, our one-guide comparison of all hosting types covers the trade-offs across every tier.

RAM (memory) serves as the high-speed workspace where the operating system, web server processes, PHP interpreters, database query caches, and opcode caches all reside. When a server runs out of available RAM, the operating system begins swapping memory pages to disk — a process that is orders of magnitude slower than RAM access — and performance collapses across every service on the server. Shared hosting plans combat this by enforcing per-tenant memory limits through containerization technologies like CloudLinux's LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment), which sets hard ceilings on the RAM that any single cPanel account can consume. Exceeding these limits triggers process throttling or termination rather than allowing one tenant to starve the server of memory. VPS and dedicated server plans, with their guaranteed RAM allocations, eliminate the noisy-neighbor memory problem entirely.

Storage technology — the type and configuration of the drives that hold the operating system, web server software, website files, and databases — is the most underappreciated determinant of hosting performance. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs, which connect directly to the CPU via PCIe lanes rather than through the SATA interface, deliver sequential read speeds of 3,000 to 7,000 MB/s compared to SATA SSDs at 500 to 550 MB/s and traditional HDDs at 80 to 160 MB/s. For database-heavy applications — and nearly every dynamic website is database-heavy — NVMe storage reduces query execution times by 50% to 80% compared to SATA SSDs, because database operations are predominantly random-read I/O rather than sequential, and NVMe's higher IOPS (input/output operations per second) and lower latency provide an outsized benefit for random-access workloads. Hosting providers that advertise "SSD storage" without specifying NVMe versus SATA are almost certainly using SATA SSDs, which, while vastly better than HDDs, represent 2016-era storage technology in a 2026 hosting market where NVMe has become the performance baseline for any plan above budget tier. For a deeper dive into storage considerations, our SSD vs NVMe vs HDD comparison breaks down the real-world performance differences.

Shared Hosting Architecture: Multi-Tenant Resource Allocation

Shared hosting is the economic foundation on which most of the web is built: a single physical server hosting hundreds or thousands of individual websites, with each website allocated to its own isolated directory, its own cPanel or control panel account, and its own database, but sharing the server's CPU cores, RAM, storage I/O, and network bandwidth with every other tenant. Understanding shared hosting architecture is central to understanding how does web hosting work at the most common price point — the $3 to $15 per month tier where the vast majority of personal blogs, small business websites, and portfolio sites reside.

The technology that makes multi-tenant hosting viable in 2026 is CloudLinux, an operating system built on CentOS/AlmaLinux that extends the Linux kernel with LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment) — a containerization layer that enforces per-tenant resource limits without the overhead of full virtual machines. CloudLinux's LVE assigns each cPanel account a dedicated slice of CPU, RAM, I/O throughput, IOPS, inode count, and number of concurrent processes. When a tenant's website exceeds its allocated limits — for example, a WordPress site hit by a traffic spike that pushes CPU usage past its 100% of one core limit, or a compromised site running a cryptocurrency miner that consumes excessive I/O — CloudLinux throttles the processes for that specific tenant while leaving all other tenants unaffected. Before CloudLinux and similar isolation technologies became industry standard in the mid-2010s, a single misbehaving website could degrade performance for every other tenant on a shared server; modern shared hosting, when properly configured, provides resource isolation that makes the "noisy neighbor" problem manageable and predictable.

The resource limits that define a shared hosting plan's real-world capability — as opposed to its marketing specifications — are the per-tenant ceilings on CPU usage, physical memory, I/O throughput, entry processes (the number of concurrent PHP or CGI processes), and inodes (the total number of files and directories). A plan advertised as "unlimited websites, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth" but limited to 1 CPU core, 2 GB of physical memory, 1 MB/s of I/O throughput, and 20 entry processes will perform dramatically worse than a plan with a realistic 25 GB storage cap but 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of physical memory, 10 MB/s of I/O, and 40 entry processes. The "unlimited" marketing language, which dominates the shared hosting industry's advertising, is made possible by the fact that the vast majority of websites on shared hosting consume a tiny fraction of the server's resources — a personal blog with 500 monthly visitors uses perhaps 1% of its allocated resources — and the provider can statistically accommodate the rare high-usage outlier through resource throttling rather than hard caps. Our unlimited shared hosting explainer dissects the fine print behind the marketing claims.

The operational reality of shared hosting is that it excels for websites whose resource consumption fits within a narrow and predictable band: sites receiving fewer than 50,000 monthly page views, running well-optimized software with page caching enabled, not executing long-running background processes (video encoding, bulk email sending, large data imports), and not storing unusually large files (video hosting, high-resolution image archives, software downloads). When a website's resource needs exceed this band — whether through traffic growth, software complexity, or the fundamental nature of its content — the upgrade path leads to VPS hosting, where dedicated resources eliminate the constraints of multi-tenant resource sharing. Our shared vs VPS comparison provides a decision framework for determining when that upgrade threshold has been reached.

TLS/SSL Encryption: How HTTPS Secures the Connection

The S in HTTPS stands for Secure, and it is implemented through Transport Layer Security (TLS) — the cryptographic protocol that encrypts all data transmitted between the browser and the web server, preventing eavesdropping, tampering, and impersonation. In 2026, HTTPS is not optional: browsers mark HTTP sites as "Not Secure" with prominent warnings, search engines rank HTTPS sites above HTTP equivalents, and many web platform features — including HTTP/2, service workers, and geolocation APIs — require a secure context. Understanding how TLS fits into the hosting stack is an essential component of understanding how does web hosting work for any website owner.

The TLS handshake, which occurs after the TCP connection is established but before any application data is exchanged, involves the browser and server agreeing on a cipher suite, authenticating the server's identity through its SSL certificate (an X.509 digital certificate issued by a Certificate Authority), and establishing a shared session key through asymmetric cryptography (typically RSA or ECDHE key exchange). This handshake adds one to two round-trips of network latency — 50 to 200 milliseconds depending on geographic distance — and consumes measurable CPU resources on both the client and server for the cryptographic operations. TLS session resumption, which allows returning visitors to skip the full handshake by reusing a previously established session key, reduces this overhead for repeat connections. Modern TLS 1.3, standardized in 2018 and now supported by over 95% of web traffic, reduces the handshake to a single round-trip and removes obsolete cryptographic primitives, making HTTPS faster than HTTP in many real-world scenarios when combined with HTTP/2 multiplexing.

SSL certificates — the digital credentials that authenticate a website's identity to visitors — are available through multiple channels. Free certificates from Let's Encrypt, a non-profit Certificate Authority operated by the Internet Security Research Group, use automated domain validation (DV) to verify that the certificate requester controls the domain, and are issued within seconds through the ACME protocol. Paid certificates from commercial CAs offer organization validation (OV) or extended validation (EV) with additional identity verification steps and, in the case of EV certificates, display the organization's name in the browser's address bar. For the vast majority of websites, Let's Encrypt certificates provide identical cryptographic security to paid certificates at zero cost, and hosting providers that include automatic Let's Encrypt integration — automatically provisioning and renewing certificates without manual intervention — have made HTTPS deployment a one-click or zero-click operation for shared hosting customers. Our SSL certificates guide explains the different certificate types and their use cases in detail. TLS termination — the point in the hosting infrastructure where encrypted traffic is decrypted — has architectural implications: terminating TLS at a reverse proxy like Nginx or a load balancer offloads the cryptographic overhead from application servers while allowing internal traffic between the proxy and application servers to travel unencrypted (or re-encrypted) within the trusted data center network.

Frequently Asked Questions