Glossary

Auto responders are the email addresses that reply to anyone who sends them mail. They are not real email accounts. They are used to send out the identical information to anyone who emails them.

Bandwidth describes the amount of data that can be transferred through the internet from the web server to the browser in a given period of time.

Control Panel is a web based interface for administrating your hosting account. It helps you set email accounts, gives information on log files and has other features depending on its functionality.

Disk Space is the amount of storage available on the hosting server for your website with all related documents.

Dedicated Hosting means you have an entire dedicated server to host your web site only. Except for the larger disk space and bandwidth, it has plenty of other advantages - on a dedicated server you will install only software and applications you want to use.

DNS is a Domain Name System. You need domain name servers so people entering your domain name in the browser will get on your website. The most popular domains are .com, .net, .org, .info. There are also regional domains (.us, .uk).

FTP is a File Transfer Protocol. It is designed for the file transfer and is the preferred method for uploading your website to a hosting account.

NOC is a Network Operation Center, also called a Datacenter. Thousands of hosting servers are housed in the secure, specially equipped NOCs.

POP is a Post Office Protocol for retrieving mail from a remote server. The current version is POP3. A POP3 account is a place on the server used for storing incoming email messages.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is the amount of memory on the server that your website can use. A large amount of RAM will make the server work faster while a little amount of RAM can slow down its appearance.

Shared Hosting is the term used to describe the service when many websites share the single server. It provides you with a limited amount of disk space, as well as limited bandwidth, because they are distributed among many clients.

SMTP is a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It is the standard protocol for transmitting email. The web hosting company will have an SMTP server, but normally you should be able to use the SMTP server supplied by your internet service provider.

VPS is a Virtual Private Server. The virtual private server hosting is a compromise between shared and dedicated server hosting. The web server software and the entire operating system environment are isolated for each site hosted on the physical machine in a virtual hosting environment. It means you can do anything you can do with a dedicated server, except that the physical resources are shared between multiple virtual private servers.