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Hosting Term Glossary

The definitions of most hosting terms are universally black and white. Others, however, live in the land of gray shades. When reviewing Gressing's website, terms and conditions, etc., you'll want to refer to the official Gressing Hosting Term Glossary, presented below.

  • Audio Streaming
    A method of hosting audio content on a website to be delivered to users. Audio files generally take up a significant amount of disk space.
  • Bandwidth
    The amount of data that can be transmitted at a given moment to and from a web server.
  • Browser (as in 'web' browser)
    Application, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Safari, NetScape, etc., used to view web pages.
  • CGI
    CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a script or application, generally residing in the cgi-bin directory of your website, that process information between the user and the website. For example, often form data is processed by CGI scripts.
  • Chat Software
    Software that allows users (or users and support staff) to have a real-time text conversation.
  • Control Panel
    An interface, generally provided with hosting accounts, that allows you to perform site and file management tasks.
  • Cookie
    A small text file sent from a website to a user's web browser to help prepare custom content for a user or to allow retrieval of information such as shopping cart contents or registration data.
  • Database
    A collection of data stored in a structured format that can be searched (queried) and retrieved on the fly. Popular database programs and structures include MS SQL, MySQL, and Microsoft Access.
  • Data Transfer
    Data transfer is the total size of all files retrieved from a website during a fixed period, usually a month. Video, audio, and graphics consume a large amount of data transfer volume. A site that has a great number of visitors (or a few visitors who browse for long periods of time, retrieving lots of pages), regardless of content, will see higher recorded volume of data transfer.
  • Domain Name
    Domain name, the name by which your website is accessed, consists of a root plus an extension (also called a TLD for Top Level Domain). For example, in the domain name 'mycompany.com' the root is 'mycompany' and the extension (or TLD) is '.com'.
  • E-commerce
    E-commerce is the process of selling products or services through your website. To create an e-commerce system (also known as an online store) you must have:
    • Products or services to sell
    • Shopping Cart software (to display & organize products and allow shoppers to put items into a basket)
    • Secure ordering page linked the Shopping Cart
    • Transaction Processor (to charge credit cards or debit accounts)
    • Merchant Bank Account (For settlement of transactions)
  • FrontPage
    A Microsoft-developed, website authoring, management, and publishing tool. To use some of the special features of the program, the web server must have FrontPage Server Extensions installed. Microsoft is discontinuing development of FrontPage in favor of its new application.
  • Front Page Extensions
    A set of applications residing on the server that work with Microsoft FrontPage websites that provide ease of development and deployment for functions like full-text website searches, form creation, and counters.
  • FTP
    FTP (file transfer protocol) is a means by which a user can connect remotely to a web space to upload/download files.
  • Gressing
    Movement. Action. A trademarked name associated with the premier web development and technical documentation solutions provider, Gressing, LLC, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. Get Gressing, and get moving today.
  • Home Page
    The home page is generally the default landing page for websites.
  • Hosting
    The act of housing website files and applications.
  • HTML
    HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language used to create static web pages.
  • Merchant Account
    A merchant account allows a business to accept credit cards, debit cards, gift cards and other forms of payment cards. This is also widely known as payment processing, transaction processing, or or credit card processing.
  • Message Board
    A website, or an area of a website, that allows users to post comments related to a specific topic. Running topics are called threads.
  • MySQL
    Open Source, relational database which uses a subset of SQL for data query and retrieval. Many tools and applications installed on websites rely on MySQL as the back end data repository. This includes a lot of the tools offered in the Bonus Features section of Gressing's hosting accounts.
  • Payment Gateway
    Allows secure transfer of credit card funds from users on your website to your merchant account
  • PHP
    Open-source server-side scripting language that can be embedded in or wrapped around HTML to create dynamic page content.
  • Polls and Surveys
    Software used to create polls and surveys and, typically, collect and store the captured information.
  • Scalable
    The ability for a website to grow without the need for a total redesign. Scalability should be built into a website at the initial design phase.
  • Shopping Cart
    A shopping cart is the front end of e-commerce solutions. Shopping carts allow users to select products and have tax, shipping, etc., automatically calculated. Secure shopping must include secure checkout pages, and a payment gateway is needed to accept and process credit card and/or bank transfer information. See E-commerce.
  • SSL
    SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol developed to handle and protect confidential/sensitive information. SSL is required for e-commerce transactions (like credit card numbers).
  • Template
    A web template is a pre-defined layout that a user can populate with information.
  • Video Streaming
    The process of providing video data or content via a web page.
  • Website
    A website is a collection of web pages, images, videos and/or other digital collateral that is hosted on a Web server.
  • WYSIWYG
    Acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". WYSIWYG web page editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe PageMill, hide the code (or markup language) and allow you create and edit the front end of the page (as opposed to the back end, where the code resides).