Many people who are new to web site hosting may became a little confused all of the different phrases and acronyms used to describe a hosting account's features. Here's a list of definitions to help you understand which features of a hosting account may be important to you, and which you won't really even need.
Anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) allows the public to log into an FTP server with a common login. Anonymous FTP is beneficial for the distribution of large files to the public, avoiding the need to assign large numbers of login and password combinations for FTP access. You'll only need this if you want large numbers of people to be able to download files directly from your Web site.
ASP (Active Server Pages) are files which provide Web developers with an easier, faster, and more powerful way to build Web applications, are regular HTML pages with embedded scripts. These scripts can be written in any language and processed by the server when the file's URL is requested. For ASP, you must have a host on a Windows NT / 2000 platform, although you can run ASP files on a UNIX web host that has Sun ONE ASP installed.
CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a set of rules that describe how a Web Server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine, and how the other piece of software (the 'CGI program') talks to the web server. Usually a CGI program is a small program that takes data from a web server and does something with it, like putting the content of a form into an e-mail message, or turning the data into a database query. Every host will support CGI.
CGI Scripts are just scripts which use CGI. Most hosting accounts will include several good CGI scripts for you to use. If you want to make sure your web site account will have scripts for processing email forms and the like, take a look at what specific CGI scripts are included with the account.
Cold Fusion is a scripting language for web designers that want wish to do advanced development and/or database interfacing. This option on a web hosting account is usually only a concern if you're a developer or someone who runs programs on your web site that require Cold Fusion. Most sites won't need it.
Data Transfer is the amount of bandwidth provided for your accounts. Every time a person accesses your Web site, they pull down html files, images, etc., in order to view your Web pages. Data transfer is the limit of how much data can be viewed from your site in a month. You would have to have a very large site that has a lot of visitors in order to have traffic measuring in GBs (gigabytes). The hosts we list provide you with anywhere from 5 GBs to 20 GBs of data storage, which is more than enough for the standard Web site.
Domain Name is the unique name that identifies an Internet site. If you don't already have a domain name, most hosting accounts will allow you to register a new one when you sign up for your domain hosting account. The standard price for a domain name from Versign is $35 / year, but some of the hosts we list will register one for $15 or $20 per year. If you hunt around the Internet, you can find some domain name registration firms that will let you get one for as low as $8.95 / year.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. Unless you use FrontPage extensions, or have some other software for publishing your HTML files directly to your hosting account, you will probably need to have FTP access to your web site. Nearly all hosts provide this.
Maillist (or Mailing List) is an automated system that allows people to send email to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers to the maillist. In this way, people who have many different kinds of e-mail access can participate in discussions together.
POP3 Email Accounts are standard email addresses that you can use with your domain name. For example, name@yourdomain.com. These are not web-based email addresses, like Hotmail or Yahoo! mail, but standard email addresses that you can use with any email software, such as Outlook Express, MS Outlook, etc. If a host gives you 100 or so POP3 email addresses with a email hosting account, you could provide an email address to each member of a small business or other organization.
Server Side Includes (SSI) are data files that are added into a page on the web server. They make Web site management much easier. For example, if you had a 100-page site and used the same top menu on every page of the site, you could create a file called header.inc and use SSI to write that header onto the top of every page. When its time to change something on that header, you just change the header.inc file and you've just updated the header on every page of your site. Make sure your host provides SSI if you want to use this great function.
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a specialized programming language for sending queries to databases. This is another feature which applies mainly to developers or those individuals who's site has some database function attached to it. Most won't need it, but it comes with just about any hosting account.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol designed to enable encrypted, authenticated communications across the Internet. SSL used mostly in communications between web browsers and web servers. URL's that begin with 'https' indicate that an SSL connection will be used. SSL provides privacy, authentication, and message integrity. If you are going to run forms on your website that gather personal information, or e-commerce data such as credit cards and product orders, you will want SSL capability.
SSL Certificates are the means by which you setup SSL capabilities on your Web site. You can either choose a host, like iPowerWeb, that provides SSL on a shared certificate. This has no additional cost, but you will have to use a special SSL address for any page you want to place on the SSL server. To have your own SSL address (for example, https://www.yourdomain.com/securefile.htm), you must purchase your own SSL certificate from a company like Verisign. Then, you install it on your hosting account and you can make any of your pages secure rather easily. However, certificates can be very costly (in the hundreds of dollars), and you'd only want one if you are running a major site with a real need for secure data transfer.
Storage Space is the amount of memory on a host's servers provided for your Web files. Your Web files can include html pages, images, audio and video files, log files, data from on-line forms, and any other data files. Most small sites that are under 10 pages in size won't ever exceed a single MB (megabytes) in size.
