General Digital Literacy

A secret string that identifies your business to another company’s software, functioning like a password. Anyone holding it can act as you and run up your bill.

In practice It never belongs in an email, a shared spreadsheet, or a screenshot. Treat a leaked key the way you would treat a leaked password, and rotate it immediately.

A stored copy of your site or data you can restore from. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope rather than a backup — the restore is the part worth testing.

In practice Test it once, on purpose, before you need it. Discovering the backup was incomplete during an actual outage is the expensive way to find out.

The admin interface that lets you edit your website without touching code — WordPress being the best known. More power means more moving parts to keep updated, which is a real ongoing cost.

In practice A brochure site you update twice a year may not need one at all. The maintenance burden is often larger than the editing convenience it buys.

Whose name the domain, hosting, analytics, and business profile accounts are actually registered under. If a vendor holds them, you are renting your own business identity.

In practice Insist on owner-level access from day one, on every account. A good vendor expects the question; the reaction to it tells you a lot.

Your address on the internet — the part after the www. You rent it annually rather than own it outright, and letting it lapse is one of the few web mistakes that is genuinely hard to undo.

In practice Expired domains get bought within hours by resellers. Recovering one is expensive when it is possible at all, so auto-renew is not optional.

The company you rent your domain name through, such as GoDaddy or Namecheap. It is a separate thing from your web host, and the registrar account is the single most important login your business owns.

In practice If a vendor registered the domain under their own account, they control your business address. That is worth resolving today rather than during a dispute.

Software whose code is public and free to use and modify. It avoids licensing fees and lock-in, but “free” covers the license only.

In practice Hosting, setup, security updates, and someone who knows how to fix it are all still real costs. Free software, paid maintenance.

Whether you are buying something outright or renting it monthly. Both are legitimate — the trap is a proposal that blends them so the real annual cost is hard to see.

In practice Ask for the twelve-month total, then the thirty-six. A $500 build with a $200 monthly is a $7,700 three-year decision, not a $500 one.

Requiring a second proof of identity beyond a password, usually a code from an app. It is the single highest-value security step available to a small business, and it is free.

In practice Turn it on for the registrar, the host, the business profile, and email — in that order. Those four accounts are the ones a compromise actually hurts.

The service that stores your website’s files and serves them to visitors. Your domain points at your host — which is why you can change hosts without changing your web address.

In practice Host and domain being separate is a feature, not a complication. It means a bad host is a fixable problem rather than a permanent one.