New to web hosting? Here are some of the most common terms used.
Anchor text
The text used as a hyperlink to link one page to another.
Example: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla eu dolor.
This is an HTML (example) for creating the link:
<a href=”www.consecteturadipiscing.com”> consectetur adipiscing</a>
Quick tip: A descriptive anchor text is not only useful for your visitors to know where a link takes them but they are also beneficial from a search engine optimisation perspective.
Example:
Instead of linking like this: To find out more about our web hosting click here ✖
This is better way to link: Find out more about our web hosting ✔
Bandwidth
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.
If your usage exceeds the allocated Bandwidth, you could be charged for the extra usage, or advised to upgrade.
Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors who enter and leave your website on the same page without navigating to another. i.e. they "bounce" away from your site. This is commonly presented as a percentage of the total visits to that page/site.
An email bounce occurs when an email service provider tries to deliver an email to the recipient's email server, but for some reason it is rejected and automatically returned to the sender.
Bread Crumb Navigation
Taking its name from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale this is a method of showing the visitor the page they are on along with the path they have taken to get there (path) or if they entered the site on that page the hierarchical relationship amongst the pages (location).
Example:
Home > Fruit > Apples > Braeburn Apple
cPanel
A 3rd party hosting management control panel used by numerous web host to administer their servers and customers and to allow their customers to manage their own accounts.
ccTLD
A country code top level domain name. These domain names are associated with a country or geographic location e.g. .uk (UK), .fr (France), .cn (China). The ability to register these domain names from another country depends on the registrar’s rules. For example, .uk has no restrictions whereas .it (Italy) demands you are based in Europe.
Domain Name System (DNS)
The system that maps domain names to the corresponding machine’s 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 in different locations any updates to a domain (including registration and ownership details) could take up to 48 hours to work its way across all of them.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Once you are ready to see what your website looks like online, uploading the files to your web space is quite easy and is often as simple as clicking, dragging and dropping. The method of getting your website files online is called File Transfer Protocol (FTP). What this does is take the files from your computer and put them on to the web host’s server for people to access.
In order to transfer files your web host may offer an upload function though your account with them, but you would need to be logged in to your account to use that. As an alternative most people use FTP software. Some HTML editors have this built in (e.g. Dreamweaver & Microsoft Expression Web), but there are also stand-alone FTP applications such as FileZilla, WinSCP, Cyberduck, Classic FTP, Fetch, or Transmit (MacOS).
HTML
HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) is the standard markup language for creating web pages to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web pages. HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content.
LAMP
LAMP is an acronym used to describe a set of open source technologies for building and deploying web applications, which are community maintained and freely available for anyone to use. The components in the stack are:
Linux: operating system
Apache: HTTP web server
MySQL: database
PHP, Pearl or Python: programming language
MySQL
MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database and relational database management system.
The “SQL” part of “MySQL” stands for “Structured Query Language.”
It is also part of the open source software stack known as LAMP.
Sub-Domain
Sub-domain 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
TLD
Top Level Domain Names have no association with any countries and were amongst the first to be created. E.g. .com, .net, .org.
Web Space
The amount of space allocated to your website by a web host to store all your files and data. The more web space you have the more information you can store.
DMARC
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, is an approach at stopping or reducing email spam and phishing attacks. The DMARC specification is based around existing email authentication using SPF or DKIM. This will effectively allow email senders, when sending email to receivers implementing DMARC, to experience more uniform authentication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an email authentication method which ensures the sending mail server is authorised to originate mail from the email sender's domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
DKIM Signatures (Domain Keys Identified Mail)
DKIM is an email authentication method that uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorised by the owner of a domain, to help prevent email spoofing and improve email deliverability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
DNSSEC Protection (Domain Name System Security Extensions)
DNSSEC works by digitally signing records for DNS lookup using public-key cryptography. This ensures the DNS records returned for your domain are those set on our nameservers. We automatically sign the domain zone and submit the records to the registry, so this should only be enabled if using our nameservers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System_Security_Extensions
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