General Web Hosting - Frequently Asked Questions

Web hosting is a service in which you buy or rent space and bandwidth on a server where you can publish your websites.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted at a given moment to a server. The higher your bandwidth, the larger amount of traffic your site can handle at one time.

No. Offering unlimited bandwidth or disk space is simply not possible as all hardware has limitations.

You will need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program like WS FTP.

Your uptime is the percentage of time that your web site is reachable. Most web host will offer 99% or more uptime (excluding scheduled maintenance).

The cgi-bin is a directory set aside by your host where you can store and run your cgi scripts. Although most host allow cgi scripts to be used in any directory, this is usually defualt directory for cgi scripts.

A subdomain is a sub directory you can add to your site. For example: http://name.mydomain.com This is very useful if you run a large site and would like to break it up into sections.

The .htaccess file is an ordinary text file that you can create using Notepad or any text editor and ftp it into your Web root directory. This file will contain the configuration statements (commands) to customize the Apache Web server software for your Website. The .htaccess file can be used to password protect directories and many other things, but if your not careful can really harm your website. If you make a mistake with .htaccess you will need to delete it from your server or upload a new one. Always keep backups.

SSI, or Server-Side Include, is a type of HTML comment that directs the Web server to dynamically generate data for the Web page whenever it is requested. Web pages that use SSIs often end with a .shtml extension, though this is not a requirement.

Telnet is a user command and an underlying TCP/IP protocol for accessing remote computers. On the Web, HTTP and FTP protocols allow you to request specific files from remote computers, but not to actually be logged on as a user of that computer. With Telnet, you log on as a regular user with whatever privileges you may have been granted to the specific application and data on that computer.

Cron jobs are set in crontabs (or cron tables) on a server. Cron Jobs are used when you need to run a script or execute a command on a certain schedule. For example, your could set a crontab to do a backup every few hours.

cPanel (control Panel) is a graphical web-based web-hosting control panel that allows easy administration of a website. cPanel gives you the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.