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While searching for good web hosting, the site owners should be aware of some technical terms of web hosting. Proper ideas of these keywords helps you to search the most suitable web host for your website. I am giving a list of some important hosting keywords.

• Applet — It is an embedded program on a web site. They are usually written in Java and are normally used for creating a virtual object that may move or interact with the web site.
• Database — If your web site require a database to store information, database support by the hosting company will be required. Some commonly used database programs are SQL Server, MySQL, Access, Oracle, and FoxPro. Before you sign up with a web host, first inquire if the host can support your database needs. If you want to install Wordpress, Vbulletin, Joomla, Drupal etc on your server then you must need a database support from your hosting company.
• Auto Responder — An automated program that acknowledges receipt of an e-mail message, and then sends back a previously prepared email to the sender, letting them know it was received. Once you configure your autoresponder, it sends e-mail with no further action required on your part, making your web site interactive around the clock. You can set this up through their control panel.
• Uptime — Uptime refers to the amount of time within a 24 hour period a system is active or available for servicing requests. For example, if a hosting company says it is available 99.9% of the time, they are claiming that your web site will up all the time except for about 8 seconds each day. Over the course of a year, in this example, the hosting company is claiming that your site will only be unavailable (couldn’t surf to it) for 48 hours.
• Domain name — The name of your site like abhisays.com. The domain name is a name that identifies an IP address as the world wide web is based on IP addresses, not domain names, web servers depend on a Domain Name System (DNS) to translate domain names into IP addresses.
• ASP — ASP stands for Active Server Pages. Active Server Pages allow web developers to make their sites dynamic with database driven content for example user registration or user poll. The code is mainly written in VB Script, and it is produced on the server of the web site instead of the browser of your web site visitors. The server reads the ASP code and then translates it to HTML.
• Backups — If you think you may need to restore old data in case of any error or data loss, it may make sense to choose a hosting company that performs regular backups. However, most of the web hosts provide facility of taking the backup of your site.
• Domain Parking — It is the option to ‘park’ your domain name without actually having your web site up and running.
• Audio Streaming — Audio Streaming is the process of providing audio content on a web site. No doubt, this takes huge amount of bandwidth, especially if you get a lot of visitors at your site. That’s why most of the hosts do not allow audio or video streaming on their servers.
• CGI — CGI stands for common gateway interface. Actually it is a program that translates data from a web server and then displays that data on a web page or in an email. CGI involves the transfer of data between a server and a CGI program (called a script). This allows HTML pages to interact with other programming applications. These scripts make web pages interactive. Page counters, forms, user registration, guest books, random text/images and other features can be driven by CGI scripts.
• Bandwidth — Bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred from an account as visitors view the pages of the web site. If you have a web site with lots of video, audio, and images that gets many visitors per day, you would have to make sure that you choose a host that will allow large amounts of data to be transferred. If you choose a host that only allows 6 GB of data transfer per month, and your site transferred 10 GB per month, then the host may stop half of your visitors from viewing your site and you could lose potential customers.
• Control Panel — A set of tools permitting easy site management and editing. By having your own control panel, you can maintain basic information about your site, mail boxes, etc. without having to send emails to the hosting company or call them on the phone. For example cpanel is very popular among web hosts as a control panel.
• Alias — It means “a name that points to another name”. Aliases are used to make the original name easier to remember or to protect the site’s identity.
• Disk Space — It is the amount of disk space that will be available to you on the hosts server to hold your web site files.
• Dedicated Server — It is an expensive type of account in which the web hosting company provides you with an entire hosting setup including your own server hardware that only you can use. This usually means a much faster loading time for your site because the entire computer is “dedicated” to running the server software. This is different from most other hosting accounts in which your web site will share space on a server with many other web sites, called a virtual server. A dedicated server makes sense for web sites that require higher availability and higher data transfer rates. If you are ownner of a very popular website then you should go for dedicated server.
• Cookie — Cookie is a message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file called cookie.txt. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. The main purpose of cookies is to identify users and possibly prepare customized Web pages for them. When you enter a Web site using cookies, you may be asked to fill out a form providing such information as your name and interests. This information is packaged into a cookie and sent to your Web browser which stores it for later use. The next time you go to the same Web site, your browser will send the cookie to the Web server. The server can use this information to present you with custom Web pages. So, for example, instead of seeing just a generic welcome page you might see a welcome page with your name on it.