Hosting and Domain Name Glossary

A Record (Address Record)

It contains the IP address of the server that hosts the site. In the case of a shared hosting, it involves a domain name managed by a registrar at the IP server host, and it redirects traffic for this domain name to the directory of the website.
If the host manages the DNS, the user is not involved with A record but when the domain is hosted by another supplier it is necessary to give it the IP address, as the contents of A Record.
In practice, the management of A-Record appears in the administering panel only when the DNS are that of the registrar.

CGI

Protocol of scripts hosted in a Web space. It can use binary programs or a scripting language as Perl or PHP.

CNAME (Canonical NAME)

Invisible domain redirect. Redirect traffic by replacing the URL of a domain by another defined in this field.

Dedicated hosting

This type of host consists of a space and resources on an remote computer. You are granted a part of the bandwidth on the hardware, and it is your task install a server, to manage and configure it. We choose this mode, if the goal is to customize the configuration of the server, or we want to host many sites.

DNS

Domain Name Server designates the server which manages the domain name, in other words associates the textual name to the IP address of the hosting. Association is done by two servers, primary and secondary, or more.

Synomymous / neighbors / aliases domains

Aliases are domain names pointing at the same content, the same URL. It may also require them to have the same name with different TLD, or similar names. Not to be confused with the multi-domain or domain pointing at different subdirectories and that are seen as different websites.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

List of the most frequently asked questions, and answers.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Protocol for Internet access, which is used to download files, or upload the contents of the site. You can also create spaces on a site that are accessible to users in FTP mode.

Hit

The number of hits is not the number of visitors but the number of requests to the server. If a page contains nine images, this products 10 requests on the network. Suppose a host limits to 10000 requests per day, a visitor looks at 5 pages on average (unofficial statistics) the site will be restricted to 2000 visitors a day.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)

Protocol to access Internet to display HTML pages.

.htaccess

File of the Apache server, installed at the root of the site that controls access to HTML files, and allows for example redirecting a filename requested by the browser on a different file actually hosted.

MX record (Mail eXchange record)

Field that defines the IP address of the server that handles mails.

NS record (Name Server record)

Field containing the IP address of the server of a domain name. It associates a domain name to an IP address, which may be another server on the same site, even if the company manages both the domain and the host.

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

This is the environment the most often used on hosts.

PHP

Scripting language running server-side, even if the code is inserted in the HTML pages loaded by the browser. It creates a page content based on data read from the server or some processing.

POP

A POP account is a physical storage for emails on the host server (or the registrar). Useless with gmail.

Shared hosting

Hosting shared between websites on a server. The disk space allocated, a maximum monthly traffic or a maximum number of hits can possibly be limited for each user.

Sub-domain

Name coupled with a domain name in the form xxx.scriptol.com and internally redirected to a subdirectory of the form www.scriptol.com/xxx. The number of subdomains is often limited. A sub domain corresponds to a different site for search engines.

Traffic maximum

The maximum file size transferred to the user, including HTML pages, images, archives, and answers to queries to a database. The ceiling for the month reached, the transfers are stopped or an additional cost is required, according to the terms of use.

URL-rewriting

Consists to make a translation from page name sought by the browser and the actual filename on the site or even a name created dynamically at each access. This allows for example to show clear names for unreadable filenames or the redirect broken links.
Url-rewriting, at practical level is a rule placed in the ".htaccess" or similar file.

Webmail

Online messaging and e-mails consultation.