Web hosting is a process that can be as simple or as complicated as you would like it to be, depending on your goals. For those who are interested in delving a bit further into the field, it quickly becomes obvious that there is a great deal of jargon thrown around in the industry. Here are some common pieces of jargon, and what they mean.

Bandwidth – Bandwidth has two different meanings. The more broad meaning is related to the amount of data that can be uploaded to and downloaded from a site within a specific period of time. Under this definition, bandwidth can be though of as the “speed” a site loads on a computer, and is usually measured in kilobytes or megabytes per second. In reference to web hosting, bandwidth is usually used to refer to the total amount of data that can be transferred to and from your site each month. It is usually measured in megabytes or kilobytes per month. While it is still a measure of an amount of data of a period of time, it is more closely related to the amount of data on your site and the number of people who visit it, rather than the speed with which people can access it.

Web Space – This where your site is stored, which is typically a hard drive for a server (or hard drives on servers). It measures the total amount of data that you can store online. The amount of web space that you use should be much smaller than the monthly bandwidth. To see why, imagine a scenario where the bandwidth was only twice the web space. This would mean that your bandwidth limits would be exceeded if only one person visited every page on your site twice in one month.

Control Panel – Also known as a Web Control Panel (WCP), this allows you to manage your hosting through the internet. This allows you to set up email, adjust your site, add users, perform back ups, and so on.

MySQL – The most popular open source database system, which can be used to create various web applications that can be easily scaled without repeated updates.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol. This is the agreed upon system that allows files to be transferred from a server to a computer, and visa versa. An FTP client allows you to upload files to your website.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language. It is the basic building block of web pages. The language consists of opening and closing tags, which indicate a type of command; attributes, which assign values to specific functions of the command; and text or graphical content between the tags.

Programming Languages – These are used in order to write algorithms which can be translated into digital information readable by a computer. In the context of web hosting, they allow you to create more dynamic and interactive web pages. Common programming languages include PHP, Java, C++, and Perl.

Email Forwarding – If you want your site email to be different from your personal email, but would like all of the emails to be sent to the same place, email forwarding sends email from one email address to another.

POP3 Mailbox – This is the area on the web host’s server or servers which stores emails that are sent to your site’s email address.

Email Alias – The name listed in your email, which comes before the @ symbol.

Catchall Email Alias – No matter what alias is listed, all mail sent to email addresses on the site’s domain go to the same POP3 mailbox.

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