Basic Information About The Web Hosting Lingo

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva
Total Articles: 782
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If you are new to the entire "webpage world" and hosting lingo, it would be very useful to get some information which will allow you to understand just what the heck webmasters are talking about. Lets start by illustrating the main concept of hosting, a web host is basically a computer which has been specially built to run 24 hours a day 365 days a year and which will host your websites, if you were to do this from home you would definitely not be able to afford the electricity, Internet and hardware expenses, this is the reason why hosting companies charge a monthly fee for their services. Let's describe some of the words that are commonly used by webmasters and hosting companies.

Server or Web server:
This is a physical machine which holds your website and all of the information that you put on it.

Bandwidth:
This is the amount of data that your server is going to exchange with people that are visiting your site for instance, if you upload a photo with a size of 100 kB and 10 people would come to your site to see this picture then out of these 10 people you would be utilizing 1 MB of data transfer ...
... or bandwidth, this is because 100 kB X 10 picture downloads equals 1000 kB which is almost be equivalent of 1 MB.

MySQL:
This is better described as a database where you can put all of the information that you will get from your visitors, if you are gathering statistics and information from your visitors then you obviously need a system which will about you to store all this information, that is MySQL. If you start a blog you will obviously need to store a lot of posts in your database, otherwise you wouldn't have it any other way to store information and create a dynamic environment for your visitors.

Domain name:
This is the name of your website including the .com part of it which is also referred to as a top level domain or TLD, when someone asks you for your domain name they are referring to "thenameofyoursite (dot) com" they are not asking for the full URL which includes the "http" part.

Virtual hosting:
This is the most basic package that hosting companies offer to their subscribers, it offers the ability to create several databases and host many websites which are usually limited by the amount of bandwidth and system resources that you can use, is because you are going to be sharing a web server with many other websites, this is also the reason why this type of hosting account is so cheap.

Scripts:
These are programs that can be installed on your web server in order to make your life easier for instance, you can use a blogging script such as WordPress in order to create your blog, can you imagine how difficult it would be for you to find out how to write a system which will allow you to create entire pages and posts without having to design and redesign each and every page manually? if you are not using scripts to automate certain tasks then you are obviously putting a heavy tax on your time.

FTP accounts:
These are accounts that you can create for each and every one of your domain names in order to upload content in a more easy and efficient way, with a file transfer protocol application you are able to upload files to your web server just like if you were dragging them and dropping them from one folder of your computer to another folder.

There is a lot more terminology which is used by webmasters and web hosting companies, if you don't understand them all immediately don't worry and don't get frustrated, you'll understand everything as time goes by and you gain more experience.