►► Free Web Hosting terms and definitions.

Free Web Hosting Terms and Definitions.

Industry Terms and Definitions You Should Know About Web Hosting,
Domain Names, Internet Service Providers, and Much More!

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ASP
Previously it has stood for Active Service Provider, but ASP has now come to have numerous meanings, now including any provider of a hosting or server application. Examples of applications may be applets which trigger from your browser to run system tools or protection from viruses. Typically these apps are never installed on your local machine. Yet another definition would be to provide web-based software from a remote location. This type of application is common with business database-driven software such as inventory, accounting, billing, point of sale, etc.

".asp"
.asp file extensions indicate files based on Microsoft's Active Server Page protocol. These are an out-growth of SSI (Server Side Includes) with the ability to make active server calls on databases to provide active, changeable content based on various inputs. These tag-based HTML extensions created by Microsoft are used almost exclusively on Windows NT-based machines such as Windows Server 2000 or Windows Server 2003. ASP can be fully implemented as a total scripting language which allows you to totally control dynamic web page content displayed to users, and allowing full interaction so that user actions control the content displayed according to the database.

Internet Backbone
The internet "backbone" refers to the top level internet providers who own huge "nodes" on the internet and transmit billions of transactions across their network, interconnecting to other "backbone" nodes. This has grown from an original seven locations (some of which were universities, such as the University of Illinois), to multiple locations, most of which are now private providers such as Level 3, MCI UUNet, NTT Verio, PAIX, WilTel, etc. (Cheap-Domain-Names.us connects to all of the above for redundancy and security!)

Bandwidth
This is the maximum amount of data which can be transmitted across a give TCP/IC internet connection at maximum speed using standard packet size with error-correction. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits-per-second (bps). For example, your 56k modem will transfers data at up to 56kbps (kbps = kilo bit per second), or 56,000 bits per second.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us's hosting packages offer the maximum bandwidth you're likely to find at the lowest prices on the internet.

CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
CGI are standardized sets of rules that describe how a web server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine. CGI scripts are used to perform standard tasks on a website. They are more standard and less flexible than java scripts.

CGI-Bin Access
This access allows a web author to write custom software making binary calls on CGI to handle custom software applications. Granting CGI-BIN access offers some risk for web hosts as the .bin files can be over-written with non-standard or intentionally harmful routines.

Client Software
Any software application (and sometimes used to describe the computer itself) connected to the server and used to send and receive data, and sort, organize, and display that data to a user. Your web browser is itself a client software. The relationship between the "client" and the "server" is called the "client-server relationship," and most of today's software operates with client-server, or can be configured to operate with client-server, particularly across networks and/or the internet.

Co-location of Server
This term refers to physically locating your own server on the premises of an internet host and connected to the internet host network. This method of hosting is declining in popularity as the cost of dedicated servers drops. It was typically chosen in cases where the client wishes to construct his own server to his own exact specifications and utilizing his own available cost savings. It lends an additional layer of privacy/security because when servers are co-located, the host does not usually have root access to the server. In such cases, the host performs minimal tasks other than connecting the server to the internet. These tasks may include metering used bandwidth, occasional physical re-boots for the user, etc. Another reason users may prefer to co-locate their server with a hosting provider is to physically move the security-vulnerable server off of their own network where it can expose the entire network to attack, denial of service, etc.

Copyright Protection
Protection of intellectual property against unlicensed or unlawful duplication as granted by the United States Government. Note that most documents posted on the internet have some copyright protection automatically simply by virtue of their having been posted for public access. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in the year 2000 by Congress, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, specifies the scope and limits of this protection.

In general maximum protection is assured when a copyright is a registered copyright because these types of copyrights allow the copyright owner to recover attorney's fees and greater damages from the person or persons violating copyright. Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers copyright protection services.

Custom Error Messages
This is the ability to create error messages received by a user reaching a non-existent or access-denied page or location on a web server. Without these messages, the user will receive standard (default 404) type messages and other messages.

Datacenter
See NOC (Network Operations Center). See Cheap-Domain-Names.us's datacenter in action.

Data Transfer
This is the amount of data that you are allowed to transfer with your account. Data is this case usually refers to images and text. Typically refers to a data transfer allotment, most often in GB (gigabytes). Thus, a hosting plan might come with, "3GB of data transfer." 500 MB of data transfer is equivalent to about 25,000 page views.

Dial-up Account
To access and update a Web site, hosting customers need dial-up access to the Internet (see ISP). Technically, xDSL would still be considered a dial-up account since you don't have a dedicated wire for data transfer.

Disk Space (Storage Space)
Amount of hard disk space available for storage of all Web pages, HTML, CGI-bin programs, e-mail, log files, images, sound clips, audio, video clips, etc. 1MB equals one megabyte, or approximately million bytes. A 100K file would be 100,000 bytes.

DNS - Primary DNS / Secondary DNS
DNS stands for Domain Name Server. Domain Name Servers control the IP address locations where second and third level domains are pointed. Examples of third level domains would be something like: mail.exampledomain.com where mail is the third level domain. DNS servers can determine the user's purpose using these names and route the query to the proper server, such as mail server, web server, FTP server, www server, etc. Each domain must have a DNS table to operate properly. Cheap-Domain-Names.us provides free total DNS control with every domain name.

Users registering domain names specify a primary DNS and secondary DNS location. Internet requests for a specific domain name or third-level domain are first directed to the primary DNS server, and if there is not an immediate reply from that server, the secondary DNS location is queried.

Domain Name
The unique name that identifies an internet web site or local group of stations controlled by a server. Domain names have two or more parts, separated by dots (periods). The portion of the name to the farthest right is the top-level-domain or TLD. There are a limited number of TLDs. Common TLDs include .com, .net, .org, .gov, .biz, and .us. TLDs can also be country codes such as .us, .uk, .tv, .cc, .fr, .ca, etc. The portion of the domain name to the left of the first dot (period) is the second-level-domain (SLD), and this is the portion which users may assign to any combination of letters, numbers and hyphens, up to a total length of 67 characters. You may register domain name here.

Domain Name Registration
Refers to the process of designating and reserving a domain name with an ICANN affiliated registrar so that queries entered into a browser for this domain name will resolve to a location on the internet which the domain name owner specifies with his registrar.

DS-3 Connection
This is a high-speed connection to an internet backbone which is favored by many medium-size web hosting providers and internet service providers because of its high bandwidth at a cost per unit of bandwidth which is substantially below that of a T-1 connection. A DS-3 connection carries approximately 28 times the bandwidth of a T-1 connection.

Hosting Provider
An institution that provides Web space to companies or individuals, usually for money. Cheap-Domain-Names.us is a full featured web hosting provider.

HTML / Hyper-Text Markup Language
HTML is language used to create web pages with a specific format. The page you are currently viewing is written in HTML. Without HTML, only steam of text can be displayed on a web page. HTML pages often end in the .htm or .html file extension. You can create web pages in HTML by using an HTML editor, and many powerful editors are available on the market today which do not require that the user understand HTML at all in order to properly create formatted web pages. However, the best web pages, with the most consistent appearance across a variety of browsers, are created by persons with a detailed knowledge of HTML, who create specific and exact code to provide a clean website design.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers free web design software with its $1 instant hosting packages, and this powerful software allows users to create professional-looking websites right online without having any knowledge of HTML whatsoever.

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce)
Refers to the process which allows sales transactions from websites in a secure fashion with the selection of products or services and the totaling and payment for those services, with the collection of the customer's information transmitted securely to the seller in order to facilitate delivery of the goods or services.

It is often used as shorthand for the ability to accept credit cards electronically via a credit card merchant account. Cheap-Domain-Names.us is fully ecommerce enabled and provides e-commerce services of credit card merchant accounts and secure SSL certificates for secure commerce.

E-Mail Aliasing
Email aliasing is the method by which a user sets up a catch-all account into which the server will direct all e-mail addressed to any string of characters at the user's domain name which does not represent another user's mailbox. For example, with e-mail aliasing, a user could designate the POP3 account name sales@sampledomain.com to receive all mail addressed to non-existent users. In such an example, mail addressed to a non-existent address such as fredflintstone@sampledomain.com would safely be delivered to the sales mailbox instead of being rejected by the server as non-existent.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers catch-all e-mail boxes with its award-winning spam-free email accounts.

Email Forwarding
E-mail forwarding is the process by which mail sent to one address is forwarded to another address with a POP3 account (or to another forwarded address). For example, you may have a mailbox with the name sales@sampledomain.com and you want for it to also receive mail sent to purchasing@sampledomain.com and products@sampledomain.com. You would then set up email forwarding so that mail to purchasing and products was forwarded to the sales mailbox.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers e-mail forwarding with all of its award-winning e-mail accounts.

E-Mail Autoresponders/Vacation Messages
Auto-responders allow customers to set up an automatic message to be sent by the mail server to the sender of any message. This is often referred to as vacation messaging because a very common use is when a user is away on vacation he or she sets up an autoresponder so that persons writing know their mail has been received but the user is away. Large and small organizations alike now use these autoresponders to let customers know that their message was received and a reply will be sent within a specific timeframe.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers free e-mail autoresponders with with all of its award-winning e-mail accounts.

File Extensions
On virtually any major operating system ever used, information is stored in a file system. This system was more clearly seen by end users on older DOS-based machines, and is still clearly seen on UNIX machines. Windows itself uses a file system, although it is not as clear to new users. These files reside within directories and sub-directories of those directories. In order for your operating system to best determine the specified use of a file, each file contains a given file extension, usually 3-4 characters in length, although longer names are typically allowed in modern operating systems. The "extension" is specifically the portion of the file which is after the final period in the file name. In the file name library1.dll the file extension is .dll which happens to be a Microsoft Windows file called "Dynamic Linking Library". Frequently, as in this example, the file extension is an acronym for a name which describes the file type's purpose. Users are most familiar with commonly used file extensions such as .doc for Microsoft Word documents, .jpg and .gif for picture files, .txt for plain text files, and the popular .mp3 for music files. On a PC the operating system requires the use of an extension in order to determine how to open and operate a file, and what task it should perform. On the internet, you'll frequently see file extensions indicating what type of file has created the page you're viewing. You'll see extensions like .htm, .html, .cgi, .asp, .htm, .jsp, .cfm, .tam, .php, .shtml, .pl, .cool, and others.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
FTP is a method for transferring data to/from web servers via a different method than the standard http (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) used to display web pages. FTP software is designed specifically for file transfer and is written to more efficiently and safely download files free of errors. It is also used to upload files to your virtual, shared, or dedicated web server site. FTP can also be used for direct downloads of files and images from a web server without being served from the public html directory via a means called anonymous FTP, or via a secure login. FTP access to a web server requires a password and username in order to gain access to the file and folder directories of a virtual domain, unless the server is set up to allow anonymous FTP - a useful protocol when allowing the public to freely download files or distributed software.

FrontPage2003
Also FrontPage97, FrontPage98, FrontPage2000, FrontPageXP. Microsoft's FrontPage 2003 software is a very website development software package. Originally targeted at web novices, it uses unique server-side software to create entire web pages from separately constructed headers, footers, body, and margins, and to perform tasks specific to Microsoft FrontPage, such as the use of themes, backgrounds, style sheets and other capabilities to make web sites unique. The server side software is called FrontPage Server Extensions and is commonly run on most web servers today. A web server and virtual domain must be configured to accept these extensions.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us's web hosting runs the newest FrontPage Server Extensions allowing users with Microsoft FrontPage to enjoy the full range of Microsoft Front Page features.

Gigabyte / Giga-byte (GB)
Approximately a billion bytes of data, or 1024 megabytes, or 8.6 billion data bits. 1024 of these will constitute one terabyte, and one million of these will make a petabyte.

Home Page
This the initial page of a domain, and is usually a file named index.htm or index.html. It is the first page to load to your web browser when you enter a domain name into your address bar without any additional filenames, and it typically will contain links to other places on a website.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us has free web design software that lets you build and host your own home page and website for as little as $1 per month.

HyperText
Hypertext is any text in a website which contains links to other web content (on the same or other pages or sites), or creates an action (such as a javascript) which causes other events to occur within the user's browser (such as highlighting words when the mouse passes over them) or on the server itself (such as triggering a report that a link was activated or viewed). Hypertext is most commonly used to provide links, and its appearance is often indicated by an underline and a different color than the surrounding text, but is often not indicated by any difference at all, or by other means, such as growing text, or text which changes color on mouse-over. The term hypertext came from the term "hyperlink" which is the link itself to an alternate location in cyberspace. The exact words of a hypertext link do not need to be the exact destination site. In such cases when the displayed text of the link differs from the actual link, the words of the hypertext are called "anchor text," while the link is called the "hyperlink."

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address)
Often called a dotted quad, it is a a unique number consisting of 4 or 6 parts (octets) separated by periods (or dots), and which designates a hexadecimal address used to identify server locations on the world wide web. It may appear like this: 65.33.42.110 in its most common form, but could also be expressed hexadecimally. Note that IPv4 addresses have four octets, but the soon-to-be-in-use IPv6 IP addresses will have six octets, and will appear as follows: 33.110.42.66.240.155. (whew!) Note that In general, each domain name must resolve to an IP address registered to the web server which is hosting the domain.

More commonly explained, an IP address is a number analogous to a street address on the Web. When the internet was first created in the 1960's as part of the Department of Defense, IP addressing provided a means to identify unique locations on the internet, much as street addresses are unique and identify houses and buildings in a given city.

IP addresses may be dedicated, in which case they are hard-assigned to a given computer or internet connection, so that other computers may reach a given computer at an IP address simply by using the IP address and without a (canonical) domain name. Each web server has a dedicated IP address or addresses, and individual domain names can have dedicated IP addresses.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers dedicated IP addresses to customers requiring them for reasons of having a Secure SSL Certificate. It is sold under the option: SSL support pack.

IPP (Internet Presence Provider)
This is another name for a hosting provider. Cheap-Domain-Names.us is a full service Internet Presence Provider (IPP).

ISP (Internet Service Provider)
An ISP is an organization which creates connections from its customers to the internet, thus allowing the customer to access the internet. ISP's have come a long way in the last 10 years, from a patchwork of local providers with a few dominant nationwide players (such as AOL, Earthlink, Mindspring, Juno, NetZero, MSN and Compuserve) to a consolidated few national providers and few remaining local providers, with new competition now arising around low-price point (sub $5 monthly) dial-up access, and greater competition among multiple large providers of high speed (broadband) connections based on DSL (via telephone line) and cable (via TV cable provider) service.

ISP's are sometimes also hosting providers, but have a very poor record as such. In general, companies such as Cheap-Domain-Names.us which specialize in domain name and hosting services provide far better value, price, and telephone technical support to assist customers with hosting needs.

Majordomo
The traditional meaning of this term is one of a butler of sorts with greater social duties -- much like that of a concierge but in the private employment of a wealthy person. This term was adopted to be used for an open-source, server-based mailing list system, sometimes called a "reflector" or "list server" because it can handle mailing list additions, corrections, and deletions without need of active management -- users can automatically add and delete themselves by which mailing address and which subject line they choose to send in a message to the server. The term "reflected" is used because, depending on the permissions present in a list, individual users can send a message which is "reflected" to all members of a given list. This empowerment has gone out of fashion with the proliferation of unwanted SPAM mail.

Megabyte (MB)
Approximately a million bytes of data, or 8.3 million data bits. 1024 of these will constitute one gigabyte. One million of these will constitute one terabyte, and one billion of these will make a petabyte.

NOC (Network Operation Center)
Sometimes called a Datacenter. This is the term for a secure, managed network environment which may house tens or thousands of Web servers with power backup and high-speed connections to the Internet Backbone. NOCs usually have a mixture of OC-3 and DS-3 connections, or higher (i.e., OC12). See Cheap-Domain-Names.us's NOC in action.

NT / WINDOWS NT
The term used by Microsoft for its business class operating system, called Windows NT (for "new technology"). Originally, Windows NT was created as a competitor for UNIX, and was envisioned as a cooperative effort with IBM's OS2 2.0 and designed to be a platform with a graphical design for ease of use like the Windows product, but with the first secure File Allocation Table system (NTFS) designed for a graphical user interface. It was first released without any plug-and-play capabilities, and did poorly with any type of multimedia applications, but this was considered acceptable for business use at the time (early 90's). The operating system was soon ported to a server application as was its original design intent, although it was not designed to be a web server during this pre-internet era.

Windows NT was, for the PC, the first true graphical operating system (as opposed to one which simply works on top of a DOS-based operating system, as did Windows versions 1 - 3.xx). Windows NT was considered a rough product until it's fourth version (4.0) and multiple service pack upgrades created stability. At this point it had gained some plug-n-play capabilities, and had far greater stability than initially, but nowhere near approaching UNIX and the newly developed open source Linux operating system.

The successor to Windows NT is Windows 2000, provided by Microsoft in both a server and desktop version. Windows 2000 is a far more flexible and user-friendly operating system than Windows NT, and utilized for the first time the Windows 95 interface "skin." Yet, underneath, Windows 2000, and its successors, Windows XP (for desktop PCs) and Windows Server 2003 are considered to be NT at their core, with their operating kernel based heavily on Windows NT development and code.

Thus, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server are often referred to as "NT" or "NT operating systems." Microsoft operating systems are referred to generally as "NT" just as Unix/Linux operating systems are often referred to as "UNIX" operating systems.

Today, Windows NT Servers (Windows 2000 Server and 2003 Server have robust capabilities for functioning as very stable internet web servers, utilizing Microsoft's very solid IIS (Internet Information Server), Microsoft's answer to UNIX/Linux's Apache web server.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers a choice of Windows Server based hosting, or Linux based hosting.

POP3 / POP Email (E-Mail)
Post Office Protocol (POP) is used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server, usually from a user's individual e-mail client software such as Outlook Express or other applications, which are often referred to as an "e-mail client." Note that some newer software uses IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or APOP. Post Office Protocol requires a username and password to access mail on a server. There are three versions of POP, with the latest being POP3, which has now become virtually the only POP version in use.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol
A secure transmission protocol whereby data transmitted between server and client is encoded using an encryption key (usually 128-bit) in such a way that it virtually cannot be "cracked" and read by any party which may intercept the information in between the server and client.

SSL protocol is used on virtually all websites which feature e-commerce purchasing and transmission of payment data, as well as most websites which require the exchange of sensitive information in between the client and the server, such as medical information, personal data, even name and address data.

To use SSL, you must have a dedicated IP address for the server, and a Secure SSL Certificate such as those sold at Cheap-Domain-Names.us at the lowest price on the internet for the highest level of security and the best compatibility with the widest range of browsers of any certificate on the market.

Note that a Secure Socket Layer only provides for secure transmission of data and does not perform credit card validation, verification, or merchant processing, although those tasks are all performed from clients entering information onto secure pages. See Cheap-Domain-Names.us's Secure SSL Certificate pages for more information on how you can run SSL from any website you desire.

Server
This is a broad term which generally refers to any computer which provides data to another computer (client) or clients across a wide variety of networks. Servers can be simple file servers located on local area networks (LAN) within an office or computing environment, or they can be vast internet servers sending out web pages to computers which query those pages for their content and data.

The term server is almost always used in conjunction with the term "client" and frequently referred to as the "client-server" relationship. While not common in early computing for individual home users, client-server relationships now are very pervasive as nearly every computer in home use has some type of connection to the internet, and utilizes client-server relationships to handle everything from online gaming software to updates of antivirus and utility software to simple web surfing!

The server functions not only as the computer which provides data and is the central repository of information, but also as gatekeeper between multiple "client" computers. A server can also be called a "host" because it hosts the data "served" to "clients." This is increasingly common with regard to internet web hosting.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us provides the worlds finest, most complete, and easiest-to-use web hosting at the lowest pricing anywhere. See our business web hosting packages here, or our extremely easy-to-use hosting with web design included here.

SSI (Server Side Includes)
Server Side Includes (SSI) is a practice whereby a set of tags are embedded in the HTML code of a web page and which are populated (replaced by something else) when the web page is actually viewed by the user. The content which the server provides to these tags is determined by many factors, and can be programmed by the web designer to provide specific and unique information to different types of web visitors (persons viewing the web page). This is often done in situations where the server makes a determination as to which user is logged in an provides specific information to that user relative to that user's account with with web host. SSI is run by a Perl script on UNIX/Linux servers, and is typically done by .ASP or other software on NT (Windows) servers.

Shell Account
A UNIX or Linux server can offer varying degrees of access to use of the computer by the creation of a shell account allowing the user to log in and browse, change, modify, update, and delete files from a given set of files and folders to which the user has permissions established. Access to shell accounts by users is typically done by Telnet (not secure) or by more secure means such as SSH, the popular software for which is called SecureCRT.

Shell accounts are considered very dangerous from a security point of view when the server is a shared web server (has multiple client users) because crackers can often use unscrupulous means to gain full (root) access to servers from within shell accounts without full access. This allows for mischief to occur. UNIX/Linux servers are generally viewed as far more safe .

T-1
A dedicated line connection capable of carrying data at 1,544,000 bits-per-second. At maximum theoretical capacity, a T-1 line can move a megabyte in less than 10 seconds. Although once considered to be a very substantial bandwidth, T-1 is now eclipsed by even the download speed of many cable modems which operate at up to 3,500,000 bits-per-second. To get an idea of what this speed can do, note that this high transmission rate is still not fast enough for full-screen, high-resolution, full-motion, uncompressed television video, for which is needed at least 10,000,000 bits-per-second.

T-3
A high bandwidth, dedicated line connection capable of carrying data at 44,736,000 bits-per-second, or approximately 30 times the speed of a T-1 line.

Telnet
The command and program used to login from one Internet site to another. The telnet command/program gets you to the login: prompt of another host. Note that Telnet is not considered secure as it is not encrypted. For secure communications and exchange of passwords, users should always use the SSH protocol rather than Telnet. SSH1 and SSH2 protocols provide the needed security. The software SecureCRT is capable of all of these methods of communication and is the most popular software in use.

Terabyte
Approximately a trillion bytes of data, or 1000 million gigabytes or 1,000,000 MB, or 8 million data bits. One thousand of these will constitute one gigabyte. One million of these will constitute one terabyte.

Transfer
Total amount of data which is sent from from a web site to client computers accessing the sit. Transfer measurements include all all HTML code from all displayed web pages, as well as all images, sounds, video, and downloaded data. See also Data Transfer for more information. Note that Cheap-Domain-Names.us provides more data transfer than any other web provider for the price! See our incredible high-transfer web hosting plans here.

UNIX
An operating system developed by Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs) back in the 1960s (yes!) which is designed to be secure, simple, and powerful. UNIX operating systems are used typically on business-class computers typically used as "servers" which provide information to client computers for databases, websites, or other corporate applications. UNIX has numerous variants including IRIX (SGI), Solaris (Sun), and the most popular which was developed by Berkeley Systems Division and known as BSD Unix. The version of BSD Unix which has been compiled and offered under a free GNU license is called "FreeBSD UNIX" and is available to the general public at no cost. It can be downloaded from a number of websites. Berkeley Systems Division BSD UNIX has spawned many derivative operating systems including including Apple's OSX, and the now extremely popular Linux operating system, an open-source operating system invented by (and named after) Finland's Linus Torvalds and developed into the world's most popular UNIX variant, with root kernels free to all users under GNU public license.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
This is the standard way to give the address of any resource on the internet whether or not is part of the World Wide Web (www), but as long as it can be accessed with an hyper-text transfer protocol or file transfer protocol address call, and is a part of a server listed on the canonical domain name registration tables to resolve to an IP address. The term "resource" here is used to refer to any web page, graphic, sound file, or any other resource which one can call from a URL. A URL will begin with https:// (hypertext transfer protocol) or https:// (hypertext transfer protocol secure) or ftp:// (file transfer protocol) with few or no other variants. Note that a URL can refer directly to an Internet Protocol address (IP address) such as this: https://192.168.1.1.

Virtual Hosting
Virtual hosting is a type of hosting where you are given control of your own "server" with your hosting service. However, this "virtual server" is not an entire computer server. This server is called "virtual" because it is one of multiple "virtual" servers located on a single physical server computer. There can be anywhere from two "virtual servers" on an actual server, up to 400 or even 500 virtual servers on an actual server. The virtual servers are almost always UNIX or Linux, and each have assigned to them a portion of a hard drive using a UNIX "jail" partitioning software so that no virtual server can access the partitions assigned to a different virtual server. Virtual servers have separate IP addresses assigned to each server, and each virtual server functions much like a dedicated server, able to do almost everything that a dedicated server can do in terms of serving as an internet host.

However, virtual servers have a number of drawbacks. First of all, a virtual server can be restarted by an individual user but the entire physical server cannot be rebooted by the user. This is because a reboot of the physical server would bring down all virtual clients on the physical server. Also, virtual servers share physical resources, and that means that if another virtual server which shares your physical server is under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, or even has a very high hit rate, it can consume almost all of the physical server's resources. Also, some other virtual server owners may not be very good neighbors. They may be crackers who try to gain access to the whole physical server, endangering your security.

Virtual servers were created to provide the market need for servers where users have "root" access to the complete server, but at a lower cost than that of provisioning a full physical (dedicated) server to the customers. Virtual servers require much more management by the providers than dedicated servers require, and for this reason are now rarely much less expensive to provide than dedicated servers, particularly since the cost of hardware has come way down, and dedicated servers are very inexpensive. Due to the many drawbacks of virtual servers, Cheap-Domain-Names.us does not offer them to its customers.

Web Server
A computer or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can also refer to a particular piece of software, such as Apache for UNIX/Linux, which provides actual web server functionality to a server computer. For more information, see "Server" defined above.

Cheap-Domain-Names.us offers Web Servers (Hosting) to its customers at the lowest pricing anywhere, with extremely easy-to-use FREE web design software INCLUDED in the price!

Web Site / Website
A web site is a collection of web pages that reside together on the World Wide Web and are connected with a common theme, and usually a common domain name. Websites can exist across multiple servers, and multiple IP addresses, and even multiple domain names, but have a common theme, and are inter-connected by hyperlinks in such a way that they function together as a complete site.

Web Site Traffic Reporting
Software which reports the amount of activity on a website, and can also provide more specifics, including important information such as traffic broken down by day, hour, minute, source of traffic, pages accesses, server which referred the pages, and even the search term which was used to find the given page. Information is divided by hits (number of items accessed including pages, graphics, etc.), page views (html pages viewed), and actual bandwidth used in the access of these items. Popular reporting tools include Analog, Webalizer, and WebTrends, however, with the recent introduction of Cheap-Domain-Names.us's Traffic Facts software, users get better information, better organized, with more detail offered if desired, at a lower cost. See Cheap-Domain-Names.us's Website Traffic Analysis Software pages for more information.

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