Web Hosting 101 – Basic Web Hosting Concepts

Web hosting can be quite a confusing proposition, what with all the various terms and acronyms associated with web hosting. Even websites that are targeted towards beginners have such technical jargon that it is impossible for the so called beginners to understand anything. Thus, to remove the mystery surrounding web hosting, here are some basic web hosting concepts and their meanings.

Domain Name: A domain name is what you type into the address bar of a web browser in order to browse a particular site. Domain names can be obtained for free from various web hosting companies, whereas other web hosts may require you to pay for it.

Bandwidth: The exact amount of data that can be retrieved from your site within a particular length of time is referred to as bandwidth. The length of time it can be retrieved in is known as the bandwidth period. Your bandwidth period is reset when it expires, which could be every month, quarterly etc.

Disk space: Disk space is like the space on your hard drive. Your hard drive space determines how much can be stored on your computer; whereas disk space determines how much can be stored on your website. It is measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB) and is allocated by your web hosting company.

POP3: This is short for Post Office Protocol. It is a very popular and common email post box application that is used to receive emails and store them for retrieval. The latest version of POP in use today is known as POP3.

Email: Email is short for Electronic Mail and refers to the sending and receiving of messages through the internet.

Name servers: This is a type of server that translates a domain name (e.g. Yahoo.com) into a numerical IP address (e.g. 12.10.42.108) which can then be understood by machines and the website you want to visit can be accessed.

Control panels: A particular type of software or web interface is used to manage, monitor, and maintain websites. This interface is known as a Control Panel.

SSI: SSI is short for Server Side Includes. These are different commands that can be built into web pages which are subsequently processed by web servers when someone requests a file. SSI commands are most commonly used to add a common menu to all the web pages on a site. By doing so, the menu on each page does not have to be changed. Instead, the menu can be changed just once and added to all the pages with SSI commands.

Frontpage extensions: Front Page is Microsoft proprietary software that is a kind of HTML editor that is used for developing websites. Frontpage extensions are mini programs that enable the smooth functioning of different features of a website that has been developed using Front Page.

CRON: CRON is short for chronograph and is a kind of time based scheduling program. With this program, Unix users can execute various scripts or groups of commands at a pre-specified time and date. These commands are automatically executed at the correct time and date. A very popular use of CRON nowadays is scheduling the downloading of email through the internet.