Web Terms Explained - Part 2

When looking for the right web host you need to think about what service you need. Are you an experienced webmaster or a beginner? Those that are experienced will be able to understand all the different features on offer from the different webhost companies. Beginners need to ensure that have a webhost that offer customer service where they can phone someone and speak to them regarding any queries.

Most webhosting companies that have phone support are aware that most people that call are new to web development so they are trained to deal with complete novices. They will be able to tell the experienced from the beginner in the way they ask questions and will be armed with the right wording to explain what you need to know.

If you're a beginner but want to know what all the features mean to different webhosting packages then I shall try to explain them all to you in simple terms.

Disk space or Web Space refers to how much actual hard disk space you are allowed to occupy on your hosting companies web servers. Generally you have more than enough allocated to you than you will actually need.

Bandwidth refers to how much data transferring your web hosting account allows to run through you website. So if you have a home page with is 25 KB and someone visits your page, this will count at 25 KB of data being transferred which means you will have used up 25 KB of your 'bandwidth'. Now if 10 people view you webpage then you will have used up 250 KB of your 'bandwidth'. 1 to 5 GB bandwidth is enough for new websites. If your sites starts to get hundreds of thousands of 'hits' to your site then you are getting lots of traffic and might need to ask for more bandwidth.

An FTP account stands for file transfer protocol. You need an ftp account to log into and upload files. This feature is standard for all paid web hosting accounts as you are buying this space so need an FTP account to access it. You will need an FTP program like FTP surfer, or CuteFTP which are free to download. Once you have signed up with a web hosting company you will be given a username and password which you will need to put into your FTP program to be able to access and transfer your files.

POP3 Email accounts allows you to create and setup emails accounts with the address being... whateveryouwant@yourdomain.com. Some email accounts allow you to choose what alias you want, alias being a nickname that you can apply to an email account. You could have one called sales@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com or you could use names like Carolyn@yourdomain.com. The amount of email boxes you receive will depend on the hosting provider and what they offer.

E-mail Forwarders are where you can have a copy of any email you receive sent to another email account of your chose.

An Auto responder is a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. This is good if you are going on holiday and don't want to ignore any e-mail sent while your away. You can set the auto responder up very easily to send a message to everyone who emails you saying you're on holiday and will be back on a curtain date. It is also good for marketing if you want every person that contacts you to receive some specific information.

If your hosting account comes with Control panel this will be software installed for you the webmaster to handle common tasks associated with webhosting. In this section you can change passwords, create email accounts, alter file permissions, monitor your bandwidth, add auto responders, email forwarders' and check you statistics. If you have a database you will be able to access it via the control panel

A database is a collection of related information stored in a computer in a systematic way. A database typically has a "backend" which is controlled by administrators via passwords. The "frontend" displays the content to the final user. Some hosting packages come with one or more databases and SQL to query the data.

MySQL stands for 'structured query language' which is language used to talk to data stored in a database. If you have a database full of stock and you want query the database to find out how many specific items you have, you would use SQL. For example, if your database stored information about shoes, and you wanted to know how many size 8 red shoes you have in stock, SQL would be the best way to query the data. It can be used with other languages such as PHP to generate dynamic web pages which depend heavily on storing deleting and updating data.

Crontabs or also known as cron jobs are programs that runs on UNIX to run scheduled tasks. These tasks could be one time events or recurring tasks. This is good if you want to run a script to update a backup of your website.

.htaccess is a simple ASCII file similar to those created in Notepad which is files that allow you to override certain server configurations. Its main known use is related to implementing custom error pages or password protected directories.

If you are offered web stats on your hosting account then you will be able to access different statistics relating to your website. Depending on what type of web statistics program is installed will depend on what stats you get. The type of information you will be able to see is: The number of unique visitors to your website each day, daily and monthly traffic, your bandwidth used, what type of browsers and operating systems your visitors use, the search engines people used to find you, the top keywords used, and much much more..

On part three of this article I will go into the many different programming languages available to you and their uses.