Difference between revisions of "Category:Helpful Definitions"

This section is to provide definitions of terms used in web hosting

What is a Domain name?

Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, a server computer hosting a web site, or the web site itself or any other service communicated via the Internet. What is a URL?

What is a HTTP request?

Whenever your web browser fetches a file (a page, a picture, etc) from a web server, it does so using HTTP - that's "Hypertext Transfer Protocol". HTTP is a request/response protocol, which means your computer sends a request for some file (e.g. "Get me the file 'home.html'"), and the web server sends back a response ("Here's the file", followed by the file itself).

What is a Web server?

A web server is a computer that stores websites on the Internet and delivers web pages to viewers upon request. This service is referred to as web hosting. Every web server has a unique address, called an Internet Protocol address, that tells other computers connected to the Internet where to find the server on the vast network. The Internet Protocol (IP) address looks something like this: 69.93.141.146; this address links to a more human-friendly address, such as http://www.ieinternet.com/ Web hosts rent out space on their web servers for people or businesses to set up their own websites, and the web server allocates a unique website address to each website it hosts.

What is a Web browser?

Surfing the web is made possible by Web browsers. Browsers are basically software programs that allow you to search for and view various kinds of information on the Web, such as web sites, video, audio, etc.

What is a IP address?

Every computer connected to the Internet must have a unique address known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The IP address is a numeric address written as a set of four numbers separated by dots, for example 64.149.219.213. The address provides a unique identification of a computer and the network it belongs to.

What is Hosting?

(What we do) Hosting (also known as Web site hosting and Web hosting) is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more Web sites. More important than the computer space that is provided for Web site files is the fast connection to the Internet. Using a hosting service lets many companies share the cost of a fast Internet connection for serving files.

What is DNS?

Domain Name System - a system of mapping names to IP addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic, they're easier for humans to remember. The Internet, however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, DNS translates the name into the corresponding IP address. It is similar to a phonebook for the Internet.

What are Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird? etc

They are 3 different types of e-mail clients. An email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent (MUA), is a computer program used to manage a user's email

What is meant by the term blacklisted?

In computing, a blacklist is an access control system which denies entry to a specific list (or a defined range) of users, programs, or network addresses.

What is a email footer?

The bottom section of an e-mail message that contains information. The footer will usually contain the company's mailing address, phone number, e-mail contact address, Web site link, and often unsubscribe links or directions.

What are POP and SMTP servers?

Post Office Protocol is the most common protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Most e-mail applications (sometimes called an e-mail client) use the POP protocol, although some can use the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). The newest version, POP3, can be used with or without SMTP (an e-mail sending protocol, stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). IMAP servers are similar to POP servers, the only difference being they save the e-mail so they can be retrieved from multiple locations or multiple users.

What is WebMail?

WebMail - Provides the user an interface on the Internet so they can access their e-mail messages from any computer.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth in respect to hosting, is the amount of information that can be transferred from the server to a Browser. Hosts usually limit the amount of bandwidth a user has available per month. As an example, if you had a file on your site that was 1mb and you had 1Gb of bandwidth, users could download the file 1000 total times.

What is Disk Space?

Disk Space - the total physical amount of hard drive space a host allows a user to have.

What is a Dedicated Server?

A Dedicated Server is one that only has a single website running on it. Rather than a shared server which has multiple websites being served up.

What is a CGI Service

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. CGI provides a method to interface a computer program with an HTML page. CGI programs can be written to do many different things, which includes: counting visitors to your web site; processing data obtained from online forms; and creating simple animations.

What is a dashboard?

In information technology, a dashboard is a user interface that, somewhat resembling an automobile's dashboard, organizes and presents information in a way that is easy to read.

What is IMAP4?

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It, like POP, is a way of accessing your email on our servers. The primary advantage to IMAP is that since it maintains the original emails on the server, no matter how many different machines you login from you will have complete access to all your email. It also let’s you work with an unlimited number of server-side folders, which makes IMAP a perfect companion to server-side email filtering and Spam administration

What is encrypted mail?

Email encryption refers to encryption, and often authentication, of email messages, which can be done in order to protect the content from being read by unintended recipients.

What is FTP?

File Transfer Protocol - Allows the transfer of one or more files from one computer to another across the Internet. Usually from a personal computer to a Server or vice versa.

What is meant by the term “cached”?

In computer terms a cache is a type of temporary storage. Your computer's cache stores information about whatever program you're running. Cache memory usually runs at a higher speed than a hard disk so that this information can be accessed quickly.

What is a DNS cache?

A DNS cache contains entries that translate Internet domain names such as "ieinternet.com" to IP addresses. The Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) involves caching on both Internet DNS servers and on the client computers that contact DNS servers. These caches provide an efficient way for DNS to efficiently keep the Internet synchronized as the IP addresses of some servers change and as new servers come online.

What is a sub-directory?

A directory that is located within another directory. A similar term can be used to describe a folder beneath another folder in a graphical user interface (GUI).

What is mkdir command?

The mkdir command is is used to create new directories

What is Binary or ASCII?

An ASCII file is a binary file that stores ASCII codes. Recall that an ASCII code is a 7-bit code stored in a byte. To be more specific, there are 128 different ASCII codes, which means that only 7 bits are needed to represent an ASCII character.

However, since the minimum workable size is 1 byte, those 7 bits are the low 7 bits of any byte. The most significant bit is 0. That means, in any ASCII file, you're wasting 1/8 of the bits. In particular, the most significant bit of each byte is not being used.

Although ASCII files are binary files, some people treat them as different kinds of files. I like to think of ASCII files as special kinds of binary files. They're binary files where each byte is written in ASCII code.

A full, general binary file has no such restrictions. Any of the 256 bit patterns can be used in any byte of a binary file.

We work with binary files all the time. Executables, object files, image files, sound files, and many file formats are binary files. What makes them binary is merely the fact that each byte of a binary file can be one of 256 bit patterns. They're not restricted to the ASCII codes.

What is phpBB?

phpBB is a free flat-forum bulletin board software solution that can be used to stay in touch with a group of people or can power your entire website

What is Mail manager?

MailManager is designed to solve the problems companies have as the volumes of email they receive increase such as making sure email goes to the right person, making sure it is answered on time

Who are the IEDR?

The IEDR's originated in UCD but since July 2000 it has been a private company, limited by guarantee. It has no shareholders, the company is owned by its members who are the directors. Surpluses are not distributed, they are added to opening reserves. Directors as per the company's constitution do not have a “beneficial interest“ in the reserves of the company. Only the IEDR can administer .ie - which it does as a public service - but it is not a monopoly in the sense that anybody in Ireland, or elsewhere, can register domains from a choice of approximately 250 different national and generic TLD names. The IEDR liaises as required with national and international governments, governing bodies, trade associations and abides by Internet best practice principles while still operating as an independent private company.

What is WHOIS?

Whois is a protocol used to find information about networks, domains and hosts. The whois records normally include data on the organizations and the contacts associated with these networks and domains

What is VPS = virtual private server?

Virtual private server (VPS) is a term used by Internet hosting services to refer to a virtual machine. The term is used for emphasizing that the virtual machine, although running in software on the same physical computer as other customers' virtual machines, is functionally equivalent to a separate physical computer, is dedicated to the individual customer's needs, has the privacy of a separate physical computer, and can be configured to run as a server computer (i.e. to run server software).

What is Apache web server?

Apache, otherwise known as Apache HTTP Server, is an established standard in the online distribution of website services, which gave the initial boost for the expansion of the World Wide Web. It is an open-source web server platform, which guarantees the online availability of the majority of the websites active today. The server is aimed at serving a great deal of widely popular modern web platforms/operating systems such as Unix, Windows, Linux, Solaris, Novell NetWare, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, etc.

What is MySQL?

What is a Firewall?

What is TCP/IP?

What is NAT?

What is a Web Gateway?

What is Web filtering?

What is a Control Panel and do I need one?

What is SWG?

What is PHP?

What is HTML?

What is XML?

What is Joomla?

What is Dreamweaver?

What is CSS?

What is Perl?

What is SFTP?

What are Web crawlers?

What is a API?

What is a web container (Servlet container)