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It is no secret that when you get into web hosting, or even just hosting your own site there is an entire language of terms you must learn. From error code abbreviations to aggravating ASP acronyms there is a lot to learn. Here is your beginner’s course in hosting terminology 101.


SEO (search engine optimization)
Designing a Web site so that search engines easily find the pages and index them. The goal is to have your page be in the top 10 results of a search. Optimization includes the choice of words used in the text paragraphs and the placement of those words on the page, both visible and hidden inside meta tags. Search engines use different criteria for indexing your website, and those criteria often change. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to satisfy every one equally. Yahoo! and other directory-oriented search sites manually index a Web site, which may provide the best results for the end user.


A Record
A part of the DNS system that assigns an IP address to a domain name. This record indicates to which IP address a user would be sent when requesting a particular domain name.



WYSIWYG
(What You See Is What You Get) A graphical interface to a process which shows how the end-result will look as it is being produced, eg a WYSIWYG HTML editor generates HTML markup but displays the document as if viewed with a Web browser.


Domain name
A name that identifies one or more IP addresses: i.e. yourwebsite.com


FrontPage extensions
The Server Extensions for the Microsoft FrontPage application. These are a set of server-side applications that allow you to incorporate advanced features without having to write the complex server-side programs typically required.


HTML (hypertext markup language)
Programming language used for the creation of web sites and other documents that contain text, graphics, and hyperlinks.


Parked domain
A parked domain is a domain that points to the primary domain of your account. For example, if your primary domain is example.com, you can point example.net to the same content by parking it. Anyone who visits your site using example.net will see the same content as example.com. However, the browser’s address bar will show example.net as the visitor navigates your site.


Referrer
A referrer is the URL of the page from which a user accesses another page. For example, if you have two pages, example.com/page1.html and example.com/page2.html, and someone accesses example.com/page2.html from a link on example.com/page1.html, the referrer would be example.com/page1.html.


SSI
Server Side Includes are directives that are placed in HTML pages, and evaluated on the server while the pages are being served. They let you add dynamically generated content to an existing HTML page, without having to serve the entire page via a CGI program, or other dynamic technology. SSI page can be identified by .shtml file extension.


Whois
Whois is a term referring to a domain name search or look-up feature for a database - typically for Top-Level Domain name registries. Information such as name availability can be found through a query or search using a whois protocol (standard). Most Top-Level Domain registries maintain their own whois database containing domain name contact information.


Tracert
a TCP/IP utility which allows the user to determine the route packets take to reach a particular host. Trace route works by increasing the “time to live” value of each successive packet sent. The first packet has a TTL value of one, the second two, and so on. When a packet passes through a host, the host decrements the TTL value by one and forwards the packet to the next host. When a packet with a TTL of one reaches a host, the host discards the packet and sends an ICMP time exceeded. Customers are sometimes asked to perform this function to determine if there is a break in communications between themselves and a remote server such as Lunarpages’ servers.


Usability
Usability is the measure of how easy it is to use a website. A site would be considered usable if it meets certain criteria, which can include: having logical navigation, adherence to established conventions for the web, and providing an easy to use help section. Many other factors can come into play.