Web Hosting Glossary
Anonymous FTP:
Anonymous File Transfer Protocol. Allows your site visitors to login and
manage files without the need of a password.
Apache:
Apache is an open source, (as in free to use and build upon), HTTP web server,
a project of the Apache Software Foundation. It is the most popular free web
server in the world.
Autoresponder:
It is a function of your email account that can automatically send a response
to any incoming email.
ASCII:
Is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other
devices that work with text, allowing disparate devices to exchange text with
each other.
ASP:
ASP stands for Active Server Pages. ASP files are basic HTML pages with embedded
scripts that allow server side processing and database communication. This
allows a developer to build their web page, "on-the-fly", in response
to variable submitted by the user. ASP is a Microsoft technology and as such
ASP pages are usually written in JScript or VBScript. ASP, itself, is the server
program that parses the scripts inside of an ASP page.
Backbone:
The Internet backbone refers to the main "trunk" connections of the
Internet. It is made up of a large collection of interconnected commercial,
government, academic and other high-capacity data routes and core routers that
carry data across the countries, continents and oceans of the world.
Bandwidth:
Bandwidth is the total size of all files that you upload and your users download
from your web server over a prescribed period of time. Hosting companies often
place a limit on this value, that once exceeded will incur additional 'bandwidth'
charges. This is sometimes reffered to as "Monthly Data Transfer."
CGI:
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol for interfacing
external application software with an information server, commonly a web server.
CGI defines a standard way of identifiying an executable command, and possibly
arguments, running the command and returning its output. It also defines how
information about the server and the request is passed to the command in the
form of arguments and environment variables, and how the command can pass back
extra information about the output (such as the type) in the form of headers.
A CGI script is a small program that takes information from a web request,
or a form, processes it, and then sends an output back to the web browser.
Web servers often have a cgi-bin directory at the base of the domain, to hold
CGI scripts.
Control Panel:
A Control Panel is a web interface offered by hosting companies to their
customers to allow them the easily administer their account remotely. The most
popular hosting control panels are Cpanel, Plesk, HELM, Hsphere and Ensim
Colocation:
It is a kind of web server. Some hosts offer the ability for customers to
place their servers in their NOC (Network Operations Center) which are connected
to the backbone of the Internet. Administration of this servers is done remotely
to allow a customer far away to configure and manage their servers or network
equipment.
Cold Fusion:
Cold Fusion is a programming language originally developed by the Allaire
brothers in 1995. Then they started the Allaire Company, which was bought by
Macromedia.
Dedicated IP:
A dedicated IP address is an IP address that is used just for one website.
IP addresses can also be used for multiple web sites. You often need to purchase
a dedicated IP explicitly from your hosting company.
Dedicated Server:
Dedicated server is the one where you rent the use of separate physical computer
to store your web site files as opposed to renting out space on a computer
shared with other web sites. This can be used to host as many websites as you
wish. Since you are renting the use of a machine, you have total control over
what software will be installed on the machine as opposed to using the software
that comes preinstalled with most hosting accounts.
Disk Space:
The amount of hard drive space you can use to store your websites on a shared
server.
DNS:
An acronym for Domain Naming System. It is a system that stores and associates
many types of information with domain names, but, most important, it translates
the domain names to IP addresses allowing your web site visitors to access
websites without the need to remember the actual IP address.
Domain Name:
Every web site on the internet has a unique set of files that consititute
the site. These files are usually accessible by an IP address (Internet Protocol
address). But since an IP address is just a string of numbers they can be hard
to remember, or even completely unknown to a prosective site visitor. The DNS
(Domain Name System) allows a familiar string of letters (the domain name)
to be used instead of an IP address. So rather than typing a number of the
form: "255.255.255.255", you can type www.somewebsitename.com and
still see the web sites files. This also allows a single IP address to serve
up more than one (many) domain names.
Domain Name Parking:
Parking a domain is to point it to the DNSs of a parking service. The parked
domain name will usually resolve to a page containing relevant advertising
listings and links or more info about the domain, such as whether it is for
sale.
eCommerce:
eCommerce is the short form of the phrase 'electronic commerce' which is
the buying and selling of goods and services over a network, normally Internet,
connection.
EMail:
Electronic Mail, text based messages that are transmitted over communications
networks.
Email Forwarding:
Email forwarding services automatically redirect your incoming email messages
from one email address to an other one you specify.
Firewall:
Software or hardware systems designed to prevent unauthorized access to a
private networks from the internet or other networks.
Frontpage:
Frontpage is an Integrated Development Enviroment, (IDE) that edits several
types of text based files used to create web pages. It was developed and sold
by Microsoft.
Frontpage Extensions:
Propietary server side scripts that can add dynamic functions to a web pages
created in Microsoft Frontpage. A developer wishing to take advantage of this
functionality from within Frontpage, needs to make sure they deploy the web
site to a server that has the Frontpage extensions installed and active for
their hosting account.
FTP:
An acronym for File Transfer Protocol. It is a very popular way to easily
upload or download files from a webserver.
Gigabyte (Gb):
A Gigabyte (Gb) is a metric mesurement of computer space that is the equivilent
of over one billion bytes.
Hit:
A hit refers to a request for a file made by a web browser to a web server.
The term is usually used to improperly measure the amount of visitors to a
website. For example 1000 hits per day would mean the server receives an average
of 1000 requests per day but since most pages require several 'hits' to display
properly, the number of page views is usually less than the number of hits.
Host:
Refers to both the computer on the network, (internet), that makes available
the files it stores as well as the company that owns, maintains, and rents
space on this computer. A web host company can sometimes have thousands of
computers it uses to host millions of web sites.
HTML:
An acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a text based programming
language used to make documents for rendering in web browsers.
HTTP:
An acronym for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is the protocol used to transfer
the files that constitue a website to a visitors browser and other places on
the internet.
Hypertext:
HyperText is actionable text. It is text a user can interact with to access
more related resources for the current document. This interaction occurs through
the use of hyperlinks, or clikcable text.
Internet:
It is a publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks that
transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP).
It consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
networks, which together carry various information and services,
Intranet:
It is and internal and private network mostly used by companies to securely
share information with its employees.
IIS:
An acronym for Internet Information Services, is a set of Internet-based
services for servers using Microsoft Windows. It is the world's second most
popular web server in terms of overall websites behind the Apache HTTP Server.
IP address:
An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number that devices
use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network
utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP).
ISP:
An acronym for Internet Service Provider, A company that provides individuals
or organizations with access to the Internet.
Java:
Java is a programming language developed by Sun Microsystems.
Java is used in a wide variety of computing platforms spanning from embedded
devices and cell phones on the low end to enterprise servers and super computers
on the high end.
Kilobyte (Kb):
A Kilobyte (Kb) is a metric unit of computer space usually equal to 1024
bytes.
LAN:
An acronym for Local Area Network, it is a network of computers which are
in the same restricted physical area.
Load Balancing:
Distributing processing and communications activity of a website over several
servers ensuring that no one server, (computer), carries a disproportional
amount of traffic. This can helps avoid server crashes due to unusually heavy
traffic.
Megabyte (Mb):
A Megabyte (Mb) is a metric unit of computer space usually equal to over
one million bytes.
MySQL:
MySQL is an open source relational database software package. It is extremely
popular due to it's robust and capabilty in conjunction with its price point,
(free).
Name Servers:
A name server is one of 13 US based computer servers that implements a name
service protocol. Its function is to perform the mapping of domain names to
IP addresses for each domain name request made on the internet.
Network:
A Network is a set of two or more computers connected together that can share
resources and data.
Perl:
An acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language, it is a general
purpose programming language designed by Larry Wall and first released in 1987.
It was originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range
of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming,
GUI development, and more.
PHP:
PHP is an open-source programming language known as a hypertext preproccessor.
It allows you to embed scripts giving a developer the ability to communicate
with databases and other server software, before preparing the html to be returned
to the browser. It is the most popular language used to develop web-based applications.
Server:
A server is a computer system that provides services to other computing systems
(called clients) over a network. The term is most commonly applied to a physical
computer system today, but it is also used occasionally to refer only to the
software that can provide the same functionality.
Shared IP:
An IP address that is used by more than one domain name.
SMTP:
An acronym for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It is a main protocol used
for sending emails.
SQL:
An acronym for Structured Query Language, it is the most popular computer
language used to create, modify, retrieve and manipulate data from relational
database management systems.
SSL:
An acronym for Secure Sockets Layer, its a cryptographic protocol which provides
secure communications on the Internet for such things as e-mail, internet faxing,
data transfer, and so forth.
SSI:
An acronym for Server Side Includes, is an easy way to include the contents
of a file into another, via a Web Server.
Telnet:
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area network LAN
connections. It is purpose is to provide a fairly general, bi-directional,
byte oriented communications facility.
Terabyte (Tb):
A Terabyte (Tb) are 1024 Gigabytes (Gb).
TLD:
An acronym for Top Level Domain, is the last part of a domain name; that
is, the letters which follow the final dot of any domain name. For example
the TLD of the domain webhostinghall.com is com.
Unix:
Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and
1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees. Today's Unix systems are
split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T, several other
commercial vendors, as well as several non-profit organizations, such as individuals
who write code under the GNU General Public License.
It is the most common operating system used for web servers.
URL:
An acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, is a string of characters conforming
to a standardized format, which refers to a resource on the Internet by its
location.
Virtual Server:
It is a server sharing its resources with multiple users. The users are the
owners of the various websites hosted in that server.
WAN:
An acronym for Wide Area Network, it is a network covering a wide area. :)
WHOIS:
WHOIS is a TCP-based query/response protocol which is widely used for querying
a database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address,
or an autonomous system number on the Internet.
WWW:
An acronym for World Wide Web, a hypertext system that operates over the
Internet, used for serving Web pages and transferring files.