It is always said that before signing any contract, Read it care fully. When you opt for the Web hosting provider there are many technical terms that can confuse you or may be you are completely unaware of it. Unfortunately not all people are honest in this business. This people will take advantage of your innocence. You should not behave like a newcomer. For this a good understanding of the web hosting world and the technical terms used in it.
When you think of hosting your site i.e. you need to upload the web pages on to the server, for this you need to rent the disk space, and also confirm that the amount of the data transfer is enough to get the needed amount of content for the expected number of visitors.
People generally feel shy while asking anything, what we would suggest is never be afraid of asking questions when you pay for it. You should never enter any deal unless you are crystal clear about the deal. Ample of online material is available for you, read few online glossaries on web hosting and building your website.
Take a look at some of the technical terms that you should be aware of while choosing the web host:
Bandwidth: Bandwidth is usually measured in bit per second (bps). This is the amount of data that can be transferred from the device or it is the amount of the data that the connection support. It is usually referred as “Data transfer”
CGI: It is short hand for common gateway interface. It describes how the web server interacts with other software on the same machine.
CGI-Bin Access: It is the ability of the customer to write special programs that reside in the CGI-BIN and manipulate the data on the same site.
Disk Space: This is just like your local had drive which can store your data. This disk space is responsible for storing your web pages, HTML, CGI BIN programs, images, sound clips, e mail, log files, audio, video etc. 1MB is one Million Bytes, 100k is approximately 100000 bytes.
Domain Name: This is the name given to your sites which is unique al over the world. You can access the site by typing this name in the browsers. This name has two or more parts which is separated by periods.
Domain Name registration: When you think of any name to your site, you have to check if it is available or not, it can be used by somebody else. If it is available you have to register it. The process of registering it is Domain Name registration.
FTP: This is the standard way of transferring the data from the web server, without using the web browser. FTP softwares are available to make this task of transferring file to and from the internet easy.
Home Page : This is the first page of your web site, a first page in a domain’s public directory, usually “index.php” or “index.html” and it loads at first from the site.
Hosting provider: A company that is dedicated to provide server space for hosting the sites.
ISP: It is Internet Service provider. It is the ISP that connects your home or office to the internet. It can be different than your hosting provider. ISP is how you access the internet with your computer.
POP: POP is standard protocol to retrieve the e-mail from your mail server. Almost all the email programs use POP and IMAP. POP is a shorthand for post office protocol.
Server : In the network, you have two types of computers: Client and Server. Server is the computer that is the master computer with mostly with higher resolution and it provides data , acts as a central repository between the client computer.
UNIX : UNIX is an operating system. It is commonly used on servers. It has number of variants, descendants and derivatives which includes LINUX, Apple MAC OS and many others.
URL: It is uniform resource locator. This is the standard means of providing a standard means to a particular resource on the network i.e. World Wide Web. A URL looks like www.host.co.in
We have given some of the terms that are very simple to understand and very important to be known before choosing the web host.