Web Hosting Glossary and Definitions
Like any other industry, web hosting industry has its own terms which
sometimes may sound quite confusing. I have compiled a list of commonly
used terms and I'll try to explain these terms in layman language.
Auto Responder
It's a program that can automatically send a pre-written email
message to anybody who sends you an email. For example, let's say
you are advertising a product or service. Since you can't put all
the info in the ad, you ask your ad readers to send you an email if
they are interested in getting more info. You can configure an auto
responder with all the details about your product or service and
whenever somebody sends you an email for more info, the auto
responder automatically emails the detailed info to them.
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Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the rate of transfer of data i.e. how much data can be
transferred in a given time period over a communications channel and
is usually expressed as kbps (Kilo Bits Per Second). However, there is
a lot of confusion between bandwidth and total data transfer because
the web hosting industry uses the terms interchangeably. Thus when
your web hosting company says that you have 2 GB (Giga Byte) per
month of bandwidth what they are actually saying is that your total
data transfer allowance per month is 2 GB.
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Byte, KB, MB, GB
In most computer systems, a Byte is a unit of data that is eight
binary digits long. In other words, a Byte has 8 bits. Byte is also
commonly used to hold a character such as a letter, a number or a
typographic symbol e.g. the letter "n", the number "6", the dollar sign "$"
each needs one Byte of disk space to store. The byte is commonly donated by capital letter B ( small b is
used to donate bit). Thus the terms kilobyte is represented as KB
(approx a thousand Bytes - 2 to the 10th power or 1024 bytes in
decimal notation), Megabyte or MB (approx a million bytes - 2 to the 20th power bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes in decimal notation.),
Gigabyte or GB (approx a billion bytes - two to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824
bytes in decimal notation.) etc.
To give you some physical idea of how much 1 GB disk space can hold, let me give you a simplified example.
An average web page on the Internet is about 30 KB which is 30,720 bytes (30 x 1024). So with
1 GB disk space you can build a web site with approx. 35,000 (thirty five thousand) pages (1,073,741,824 divided by 30,720).
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CGI
CGI is the short for Common Gateway Interface. It enables HTML pages
to interact with programming applications. CGI in itself is not a
programming language but a protocol that can be used to communicate
between web pages e.g. forms and your program.
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Cron
Cron is a program that lets you automate tasks by automatically
executing a command or script at specified date and time intervals.
Disk Space
It is the amount of hard drive space on the server where you host
your website. Just like the hard drive on your desktop, it
determines how much stuff like files, web pages etc. you can store
on the host server. It is measured in MB (Mega Bytes) or GB (Giga
Bytes). Most web sites on the Internet today use less than 100 MB of
space.
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Front Page Extensions
These are files added to the server that allow you to use the advaced
features, also called components, of Front Page. There is a lot of
controversy on the use of these extensions. On our hosting packages, these
extensions are turned off by defaut but you have the option to turn them on.
If you don't know exactly what you are doing, leave them off. If you turn
them on, you must always use Front Page to publish (upload) your website
otherwise your site may not work properly.
FTP
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. As the name suggests, it's a protocol
used to transfer files from one computer to the other over the Internet. For
example, you may design your web site on your desktop and then transfer it
to our web server to make it accessible on the web. To do that you will
usually need to use a program called FTP Client; FTP clients use the FTP
protocol to transfer your files from your computer to our server.
FTP Client
It's a software program that uses FTP to transfer files or rather copies of
the files from one computer to the other over the Internet. Many free and
trial versions of FTP clients are available such as WS
FTP, SmartFTP and
others.
PERL
PERL stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. It is another programming language often used for creating CGI programs.
If you know nothing about it, then you probably don't need it. :) But if you
want to learn more about it just search for "perl tutorials" on
Google or any other search engine.
PHP
The Hypertext Preprocessor is a programming (scripting) language
which is becoming very popular. It is easier to learn than most
other programming languages and can be imbedded directly inside the
HTML pages to create dynamic web pages. A very powerful feature of
PHP is that it is interpreted by the Server and therefore offers
more security for your code whereas HTML is interpreted by the
Browser. More details about PHP are available at Php.net
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Python
Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java.
POP3
POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol Version 3. This is the protocol that
email clients like Outlook Express and Eudora use to get your email from our
sever to your computer.
SSI
SSI stands for Server Side Includes. It lets you add directives to your HTML
page and since these directives are executed by the server before serving
the page, you can add some dynamic effets to your HTML page.
SubDomain
Subdomains are used to divide websites into different sections. Usually the subdomain is a descriptive name placed before the main domain. For example,
Google has several subdomains for their website. The news section is under the subdomain
http://news.google.com and their local search section has the subdomain
http://local.google.com
Web Mail
Web Mail allows you to read your email and send email from anywhere using a
web browser. You will need your user name and password, of course!
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