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The following glossary defines common web hosting terms.
A Record
An A record is part of the zone file. It is used to point Internet traffic to an IP address. For example, you can use an "A record" to designate abc.yourdomain.com to send traffic to your web site at IP address 209.15.32.135. You can also designate xyz.yourdomain.com to go to a separate IP address.
ActiveX
a brand name referring to a set of Microsoft's technologies and services based on COM (Component Object Model) widely released in 1997. On the Internet, ActiveX can be used with IE versions 3 and above and with Netscape Navigator though plug-ins. ActiveX control is a COM object, written as a DLL in a programming language like Visual Basic, that follows ActiveX standards. Once downloaded, ActiveX controls have a large degree of freedom, presenting a security risk. ActiveX controls have to be digitally signed by their creator. Major competitor to ActiveX controls are JavaBeans. Some hosts support ActiveX server components for ASP.
Anonymous FTP
An option in FTP that allows users to download files without having to establish and account.
Apache
Apache is an open-source (source code is freely available and can be shared) HTTP Web server software. According to Netcraft survey, it is currently the most popular web server on the Net. It is usually run on Unix operating system versions like Linux or BSD, but it can also be run on Windows. It is a full-featured server with many powerful add-ons freely available. Apache's major competitor is Microsoft's IIS.
Applet
A small Java program that can be embedded in an HTML page. Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they are not allowed to access certain resources on the local computer, such as files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.), and are prohibited from communicating with most other computers across a network. The current rule is that an applet can only make an Internet connection to the computer from which the applet was sent.
Archive
Archives are large files containing valuable data. Archives are often compressed to save space.
ARPANet
(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) - The precursor to the Internet. Landmark packet-switching network established in 1969 by the US Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area-networking that would survive a nuclear war.
ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - This is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111, plus parity.
ASP
(Active Server Pages) - Provide Web developers with an easier, faster, and more powerful way to build Web applications, are regular HTML pages with embedded scripts. These scripts can be written in any language and processed by the server when the file's URL is requested.
ATM
(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) - A set of network protocols designed for multimedia transmission. Data is partitioned into cells (53 bytes each) and passed along a virtual circuit. ATM allows for building very high speed networks.
Autoresponder
A program that sends an automatic form response to incoming emails.
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