Web Hosting Glossary

We currently have 150+ terms sorted in alphabetic order

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

Access (Microsoft)
Microsoft Access is a simple database application and format developed by Microsoft, and is commonly included in their Office suite of applications. Although not as commonly used in web environments as MYSQL or MSSQL, Access is used by some in conjunction with smaller database-dependent websites.

Admin/Administrator
It is necessary for networks and networked systems to be constantly managed and maintained, and this is what administrators do. This is an individual responsible for managing, maintaining, troubleshooting, and often times supporting aspects of an infrastructure, such as systems administrators, database administrators, network administrators, etc.

Address
Unique identifier of a web page. URL (Uniformed Resource Locator) is more frequently used for this purpose.

Affiliate Marketing
This is an arrangement whereby individuals, “affiliates,” promote products and services of another company, and are compensated for successes, be they measured in clicks, sales, etc. This is a little different from a reseller, where the individual acts as the front for the products and services. Affiliates simply refer customers.

Alias
This is a name that points to resource with a different name. In the context of email, an alias is an email address which, when it receives email, directs that mail to an email account on the same domain with a different address. In the context of domain names, a domain alias is a domain name that points to a website at a different address, such as mydomain.net pulling up mydomain.com. mydomain.net would be an alias of mydomain.com.

Anonymous FTP
An FTP feature which allows users to download files anonymously, without having to establish or login to an FTP account. This is commonly used to distribute files to a broad base of visitors such as software updates or documents.

Apache
A popular, versatile and very stable open source web server application. Apache is the de facto standard in web server software, and is the most widely used today.

Archive
Archives are large files containing valuable data. Archives are often compressed to save space.

ASP (Active Server Pages)
Active Server Pages, a server-side scripting language developed by Microsoft and supported by Microsoft’s IIS web server software, enables the development of dynamic and database-driven websites. The web server processes the ASP pages, and renders the output as HTML which is then sent to the visitor’s browser.

ASP Hosting
Web hosting that supports ASP, a server-side scripting language developed by Microsoft. In essence, this means Windows/IIS hosting, the required platform for hosting ASP pages.

Autoresponder
This is an email feature that is commonly used when a recipient will not be available for a period of time, or to confirm to a sender that their email was received by the system. For instance, if you were going to be on vacation for a month, you might setup an autoresponder with a message indicating your absence. When mail is sent to you, the mail is delivered as normal, but in addition, an email is sent back to the sender by the autoresponder, the message being whatever was specified when the autoresponder was setup. Once you return, you would simply turn off the autoresponder.