Web Hosting

A term used by web hosts to describe how much data can pass from the server your website is hosted on to people visiting your web site. This includes the files that make up your website as well as any data downloaded from databases or media files.

A country code top level domain name. These domain names are associated with a country or geographic location, e.g. .co.uk (UK), .fr (France), and .cn (China). The ability to register these domain names from another country depends on the registrar’s rules. For example, .co.uk (UK) has no restrictions, whereas .it (Italy) demands you are based in Europe.

The system that maps domain names to the corresponding machines’ IP addresses. This system is essentially a phone book that translates human friendly names into computer friendly numbers. Because this information is stored across multiple computers, any updates to a domain (including registration and ownership details) can take up to 48 hours to work its way across all of them.

LAMP is an acronym used to describe a set of open source software used by many people and businesses to save money and to prevent platform lock-in.

• Linux: Operating system
• Apache: Web server
• MySQL: Database
• PHP: Programming code

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a method for transferring files from one computer to another (or from your computer to your web site). It can be used to upload your web site files up to the web server when you have finished creating your web site.

In order to do this your web host may offer an upload function though your account with them, but that means you have to log in every time. A quicker alternative that most people use is FTP software. Some HTML editors come with this built in (e.g. Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web) but even if yours doesn’t, there is an industry standard standalone free software program called FileZilla you can download.

HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) is the first layer of a web page and deals with the content, such as the text, any lists, tables, quotes, and more.

MySQL (originally developed by Sun Microsystems which is now Oracle) is the world’s most popular open source database. It is also part of the open source software stack known as LAMP (Linux, Apache,
MySQL, PHP).

Subdomain names are domains that are part of the parent domain name.
They are free to set up and can be useful if you have areas of your site you want to categorise, e.g. dictionary.domain.com, thesaurus.domain.com.

Top Level Domain Names have no association with any countries and were amongst the first to be created, e.g. .com, .net, and .org.

The amount of space allocated to your website by a web host to store all your files and data. Think of web space like the disk drive on your computer, the more web space you have the more information you can store.