Website Hosting 101

Website Hosting 101 is really just a brief introduction to Website Hosting terminology, hopefully providing enough INFO to answer the most basic questions. I'll be adding further modules over the next few months.

Disk Space: Disc space quantifies the amount of space that your web hosting has designated for:

HTML
graphics
audio
video
flash, etc.

Warning: many of the very cheap web hosting packages offer miniscule amounts of storage space.

Bandwidth (Data Transfer): When somebody visits any of your web pages, they download data, the graphics, text, audio & video files etc. Bandwith quantifies the amount of data that your account allows your visitors are allowed to download

As a very rough guide:

1 GB of data transfer = 40,000 page views

300 GB* of data transfer = 1,200,000 page views

Obviously, if your website receives significant traffic, it'll need larger amounts of bandwidth and even more if you have very data-heavy pages.

Email Forwarding: When your website's visitors send emails to different email addresses available on your site, e.g.:

webmaster@your domain.com
info@your domain.com
support@your domain.com

they are automatically forwarded to one specified email address, meaning you don't have to log into each diferent email account. This process utilizes POP, Post Office Protocol, which is the process used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server and the different email accounts, known as POP3 email accounts.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol is the means by which you can upload files from your computer to the servers at your web host

Merchant Account: Having a Merchant account enables you to process credit cards online.

SSL: SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it provides security in online commerce, enabling encrypted, authenticated communications over the Web. URLs that start with "https://" indicate the utilization of SSL.

*The average bandwith for The Top 5 Web Hosting sites