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TECHNICAL GLOSSARY

- Affiliate program: An advertising program offering a monetary incentive for webmasters to drive traffic to the advertiser's website. This eliminates the necessity for the advertiser to find websites with related content to list their banners. It also increases the response rate by giving the "affiliate" websites a stake in the response rate.

- Alias: An email alias is an email account that simply forwards to another POP3 account. An alias does not have its own storage on the mail server

- Availability: Refers to the amount of time within a 24 hour period a system is active or available for servicing requests

- Backbone : A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network, including the internet

- Bandwidth: The amount of data that can be transmitted at a given moment to a server. The higher your bandwidth, the more of traffic your site can handle at one time

- Co- location: Housing a web server that you own in the facilities of a hosting provider. This option is perfect if you want to own your own server, but do not want the hassle or security risk of maintaining that server

- Data transfer: This is the amount of data that you are allowed to transfer with your account. Data is this case usually refers to images, text, or anything else that the web server must transfer to the user's web browser. As a general rule 500 MB of data transfer is equivalent to about 20,000 page views

- Dedicated hosting : A hosting feature that allows a Web site to have its own server, and generally includes root access, giving greater flexibility and control

- Disk space: Amount of hard disk space available for storage of all Web pages

- Domain names: Domain names are the word sequences users enter in their URL bar to visit your site. They are attached to a DNS, short for Domain Naming System, which is used to translate numeric addresses (known as IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses) into words. Each site you visit on the net has a numeric IP address behind its name . eg: www.vi.net

- Download: The transfer of information from the internet to your computer. The information could be a webpage, email, or a program. Downloading things can be dangerous, so be sure to use Protection before engaging in intercourse with other computers; in other words, if you're going to be on the internet, get a good virus protection program

- E-Commerce: The ability to sell goods and services over the internet. To enable your website to sell goods and services, you need a merchant account (to process credit cards), a secure server for your form, and (if you have more than one product) a shopping cart program to "remember" what your customers want to purchase. If you anticipate a large volume of purchases, you may need a separate company to provide real-time processing of your credit card transactions

- Encryption: Encryption means encoding data using a cryptographic cipher. Encrypted data can be read (decrypted) only by an authorized entity

- Firewall: A piece of security software or hardware designed to protect servers. They are typically used to protect the server and its data from hacker attacks/unauthorized access

- FTP: File Transfer Protocol.  The Internet protocol defining how to download and upload files between a client and an FTP server. .

- Gigabyte (Gb): 1024 Megabytes, a measure of data

- Host: It is referring to an Internet company that has the required servers and software to connect domain names to (IP) Internet Protocol numbers so that your site can be viewed by the public when they type your domain in their browser window. Basically this is where you house your site, and you usually have to pay a monthly or annual fee for this service

- Hosting: This term can be used to refer to the housing of a web site, email or a domain

- Hosting provider: An institution that provides Web space to companies or individuals, usually for money

- Intranet: A vast internal network structured in a fashion similar to the Internet. Intranets are usually established by large corporate organizations to improve communication. The main difference between the Internet and an Intranet is that accesses to Intranets are restricted to authorized members only

- Kbps: Kilobits per second. 1Kbps = 1024bps, a measure of data

- Linux: A free UNIX. Linux is very often used by hosting companies as their operating systems

- Load Balancing: Distributing data across a network of servers in order to ensure that a single Web server does not get overloaded with work, thereby affecting performance

- Managed hosting: A dedicated server that is accompanied by a full suite of technical support, maintenance and monitoring services. This differs from dedicated Web hosting , where customers are provided with their own servers but are still responsible for virtually all administrative and maintenance duties

- Mbps: Megabits (Mb) per second, 1Mb = 1,048,576 bits

- MHz: Mega Hertz = 1.000.000 Hertz

- Network: Any time you connect 2 or more computers together so that they can share resources, you have a computer network. Connect 2 or more networks together and you have an “ internet ”

- POP (e-mail): A protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server

- Reseller: Resellers are usually smaller companies that still try to build their customers base.  They don't own the server with user accounts but can perform most administrative functions

- Scalability: The ability of a piece of software or hardware to expand/grow as if necessary

- Server: A networked computer that handles client requests for Web pages

- Service provider: (ISP) A company that provides access to the Internet, usually for a fee. This is not a web host!

- Shared hosting: The most basic of Web hosting types. With shared hosting, numerous Web sites share the hosting space of one server. While an economic solution, they typically cannot handle large amounts of storage or traffic, and cannot install customised applications; a major cause of e-mail delivery delay

- Spam: Unsolicited email sent in mass quantities to multiple recipients, most often for marketing purposes. Highly annoying and constituting one of the most serious netiquette violations

- SQL: Short for Standard Query Language. A standard protocol used to request information from databases. Servers which can handle SQL are known as SQL servers

- SSL: Secure Sockets Layer.  Protocol developed by NETSCAPE to provide encryption for commercial transactions data that should be protected while travelling over the Internet, like credit card numbers.  SSL uses https protocol.  Before using SSL in commerce, you'll also need to get is a certificate from a Certificate Authority

- Terabyte (TB): 1024 gigabytes

- Unix: A text-based, multitasking Operating System suitable for Web and network administration. Unix has spawned numerous popular spinoffs, including Linux and FreeBSD. Most Unix-based Operating Systems are open source, meaning the source code to the Operating System has been made freely available to the public for modification. Most Web hosting companies and resellers offer Unix-based hosting in some capacity or other

- Virtual Private Server (VPS): A virtual private server provides the features of a dedicated server on a machine that is shared by other Web hosting customers. Customers therefore get hosting services that are similar to that of dedicated Web hosting at a lower cost without sacrificing privacy or performance

- Virtual host : A shared hosting solution

- Virus: A virus is a malicious program written to do as much harm as possible. Viruses can spread themselves over the network, and are…..distributed by e-mail