Bangkok Hosting has put together a small collection of web hosting terms and some other terms we use in the language used in the industry
Like any other industry, the web hosting industry has its own terms which sometimes may sound quite confusing. We have compiled a list of commonly used terms and we will try to explain these terms in layman language.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Cron is a program that lets you automate tasks by automatically executing a command or script at specified date and time intervals.
A domain-name is your own cyber-estate. This estate, just like its physical counterpart, has its value depending on its address (name) and its content. You can charge your visitors or give them a free tour, or run a side business as part of the estate. Just like a 5th Avenue address is limited and also is more valuable than the vast majority of other addresses, the value of your domain-name can vary from a few dollars to -- well, some are going for a million dollars. We cannot tell you what furniture, art work, or side business to have on your cyber-estate, but your address would surely enhance the value of its content, or might actually destroy its value if the name doesn't attract clients.
On a technical level, it is an addressing construct used for identifying and locating computers on the Internet. Domain names provide a system of easy-to-remember Internet addresses, which can be translated by the Domain Name System (DNS) into the numeric addresses (Internet Protocol (IP)) numbers) used by the network. A domain name is hierarchical and often conveys information about the type of entity using the domain name. A domain name is simply a label that represents a domain, which is a subset of the total domain name space. Domain names at the same level of the hierarchy must be unique; for example there can be only one com at the top level of the hierarchy, and only one DomainMart.com at the next level of the hierarchy.
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.
A company that provides web hosting services is called a web host. They usually own many computers connect to the internet called servers. These servers have very large and perhaps many Hard Drives. These hard drives are divided up into sections and sold as shared web hosting. Web hosting is how you get your website online, by renting hard disk space on a server.
Everyone of our web hosting packages comes with a user friendly control panel. A Control panel in web hosting refers to the interface provided by the hosting company for the maintenance and monitoring of the hosted website. You can use it to create email accounts, block Ip addresses, create directories or folders plus much more. Bangkok Hosting can help you better understand the full functionality of this powerful tool.
This is a small file placed on your hosting package that acts as a key to your companies data. It helps encrypt information and then passes it securely when required. When a SSL certificate is properly installed on your hosting package user or visitors will see the protocol in your address bar as https and they can feel secure that any information they give you through a web form will not be read by unwanted eyes. Our website is protected with a GEO Trust Rapid SSL Certificate.
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.
It is 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.
A person, organization, or company that provides access to the Internet. In Thailand True, TOT, CAT, 3BB and now many cell com companies provide clients with access to the internet.
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.
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.
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 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!
A searchable database maintained by VeriSign, which contains information about networks, networking organizations, domain names, and the contacts associated with them for the com, org, net, edu, and ISO 3166 country code top level domains. Also, the protocol, or set of rules, that describes the application used to access the database. Other organizations have implemented the Whois protocol and maintain separate and distinct Whois databases for their respective domains.
