Web Hosting Glossary
HKWebDesign.net provides this web hosting glossary to explain some common terms and glossary commonly used onweb hosting service (or web host) and domain registration. If you have any question about our web hosting service, please feel free to let us know.
For your ease of reference, we may classify the glossary and terms according to the various web hosting service as below:
Types of web hosting
Blog hosting
Blog hosting is popular as it offers a simple means of posting and managing blog content. With Wordpress hosting, you may set up the most popular and powerful blogging application available.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting means a hosting account has full control of the entire server and its resources.
Linux server hosting
Linux server is a network computer that uses Linux as its open source operating system. Linux server hosting is very stable and commonly used by most shared web hosting service providers.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting means many website accounts residing on a web server and sharing its resources. Most personal and business sites use shared hosting.
VPS hosting
VPS is the short form of Virtual Private Server that is a section partitioned on a server acting as its own server. Typically, this is less expensive than a dedicated server but has more flexibility and functionality than a shared hosting plan.
Windows server hosting
Windows server is a network computer that uses Windows as the operating system. Windows server hosting plan is typically more expensive but necessary for some specific applications in Windows environment.
Terms commonly used in Web Hosting Plan
ActiveX
ActiveX is simply a set of Microsoft's technologies and services based on COM (Component Object Model). Some hosts support ActiveX server components for ASP in Windows platform hosting.
Anonymous FTP
Anonymous FTP (or Anon FTP) is a method for downloading and uploading files using FTP protocol without having a username or a password. If a web hosting plan offers this service, the users will be able to transfer files with FTP without having their own account.
Apache
Apache is an open-source http web server software. It can be run on Linux and Windows platforms. Its major competitor is Microsoft's IIS.
ASP
ASP (or Active Server Pages) is Microsoft's server-side scripting technology. The ASP web page has an .asp extension mixing HTML and scripting code in VBScript or JScript. ASP is distributed with Microsoft's IIS web server in Windows platform hosting.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET is the next version of ASP.
Auto Responder
Auto responder is a way to automatically send an email in response to an email received.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer on your hosting account. It occurs when someone visits or uses your website, an email is sent or received, or files are uploaded or downloaded.
Blog
Blog is a web site or portion of a web site with links, news about one’s site, commentary on the world, pictures, video and more. People also set up a blog as a tool to drive traffic to their sites as blog posts are given greater weight by search engines.
CMS
CMS (or Content Management System) is a way of organizing and managing the content of a website so that it can be easy to be updated by the web master via internet browser.
Control Panel
Control panel is the central hub of a web hosting account to manage all aspects of hosting.
Dedicated IP
Dedicated IP is an IP address that is used solely by your website. This is necessary if using SSL to accept payment on the website or anonymous FTP.
Disk Space
Disk space is the total amount of web space allocated to your hosting account on the server to store files, web pages, emails, etc.
DNS
DNS is a short form for Domain Name Servers that keep a database of domain names and their associated IP addresses. When a user searches for a domain name, the request must go through a Name Server to translate the domain name and obtain the corresponding IP address.
Domain Name Registration
Domain name registration allows you to secure a unique domain name that can be used as your website address on the internet. For details of hkwebdesign.net ‘s domain registration, please visit the respective webpage.
Domain Registrar
Domain registrar is a company responsible for managing a domain name.
Firewall
Firewall serves to protect an internal network or a computer from attacks and unauthorized access by sitting between the Internet and the internal network.
Forum
Forum is a web based message board where users can post questions or problems and receive answers from other users or the host of the board.
FTP
FTP means File Transfer Protocol that is a means of uploading and downloading files.
Guest book
Guest book is a web page where the visitors can leave their contact information and feedback to the site or request more information.
HTML
HTML (or Hypertext Markup Language) is the language in which web pages are written.
IMAP
IMAP is the short form of Internet Message Access Protocol that is a way to retrieve emails while leave a copy on the server until deleted permanently, i.e. it synchronizes emails from server and outlook.
Joomla!
Joomla! is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content.
MySQL
MySQL is an open-source database system in the web hosting packages.
Parked Domain
Parked domain is a separate domain that points to your existing hosting account. It is common when people purchase various versions of their domain to point to the same website. For example, it may purchase hkwebdesign.com and .biz and point these domains to hkwebdesign.net. Hence, it may get the same contents of hkwebdesign.net when people type hkwebdesign.com or .biz on their browsers.
POP 3
POP3 is an email protocol that allows the users to retrieve emails from the mail server.
SMTP
SMTP is an email protocol that allows the users to send emails. Although most web hosts allow the users to use the email server to send email, most ISP restrict the users to their own servers.
SSH
SSH means Secure Shell that is a means of file transfer. Many shared hosts will not allow this type of file transfer
SSL
SSL means Secure Socket Layer that is a means of encryption commonly used for eshop to accept credit cards.
Subdomain
Subdomain is a way to divide your site into sections with short and easy to remember names. For example, it may set up m.hkwebdesign.net as a sub domain for the mobile site of hkwebdesign.net.
Uptime
Uptime is the amount of time the server is uninterrupted and your website is accessible. This is typically shown as a percentage.
Webmail
Webmail is a way to send and receive email via internet.
Webmaster
Webmaster is a person responsible for the maintenance of a particular website.
Web Server
Web server is a network computer where your website resides on. It generally is owned by your web host to handle client requests for web pages.
Wordpress
Wordpress is a free open-source software that is commonly used to set up a blog or a CMS setup software.
