Glossary

    Find definitions for commonly used Hosting terms.

30-day money-back guarantee We guarantee that if for any reason during your first month with us you decide to cancel we will issue a full refund within 24 hours!

24 hour Support (E-Mail) We provide 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year chat support as well as provide an e-mail based trouble ticket system that you can use to get higher level support. Click here to send a ticket to support.

24 hour Support (Ticket Support) We provide 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year chat support as well as provide an e-mail based trouble ticket system that you can use to get higher level support. Click here to send a ticket to support.

AJAX A group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.

ASP Stands for Active Server Pages. ASP is a server-side script language that takes static html pages and makes them far more interactive. The Microsoft platform delivers reduced development time and better functionality for databases.

CDO
ASP.net 1.1, 2.0, 3.0
ASP.net AJAX & Atlas
ASPupload
ASPjpeg
ASPemail
Dundas Mailer
Dundas Upload
ASP.net 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, & 3.5

ASP.net 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, & 3.5 A web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft, that programmers can use to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services. It is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology

Disk Storage All hosting plans each come with a different amount of disk storage space allocated to all your hosting needs. The sum of the file sizes of all your web sites, all your email, and all your databases on a plan constitutes your total disk storage for that plan. We don't allow you to go over your disk storage, your average usage for a month is a set limit. You can of course upgrade your plan to raise your disk storage limit! You can see current usage or set limits on how much space any specific user can use via our hosting plans. Just for estimation purposes, a typical page of a web site is 30KB (1024KB = 1MB) and a typical email message is 3KB.

Bandwidth Bandwidth can be best described as battery. If your website runs out of bandwidth nobody will be able to visit it. 1GB of bandwidth is equal to over 100,000 hits. The average account with us uses less than 2 GB of bandwidth a month. Your bandwidth number used will reset back to zero on the first of every month. 

MS Access A Microsoft database software. Most developers however prefer MySQL or MS SQL

MSSQL Another option in addition to MySQL for you database needs. Will work perfect with your .NET applications.

MySQL Databases MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. Many forums and other database driven programs require MySQL to run. We use version 4.1.19-standard at this time with our servers.

Web-Based Account Control Panel (CPanel) Our control panel is one of the best in the industry, and has over 52 scripts that can be installed with a click of the mouse.

Web-Based Account Control Panel (Plesk) Our control panel is one of the best in the industry, and has over 28 scripts that can be installed with a click of the mouse.

E-Mail Accounts (POP/IMAP) POP3 is one of three ways you can access email in your mailboxes hosted with us (the other two being IMAP and web-based email). All email clients in existence today support the POP3 protocol, which downloads your mail from our server and copies it to your local hard drive. You can usually specify in your email client if you'd like a copy of the email to be kept on the mail server or not (or even to delete old mail only after a certain number of days). POP3 is nice if you don't want to stay connected to the Internet while reading and responding to your email: you can just connect, download the messages, disconnect, read and reply to your messages, re-connect, send the messages, and then disconnect! One problem with POP3 is if you decide to delete your old email from the server you won't have any old mail available to you when you try and check it via a different computer (or using the IMAP protocol or web-based email). On the other hand, this saves disk space on your plan!   

IMAP is one of three ways you can access email in your mailboxes hosted with us (the other two being POP3 and web-based email). Most email clients in existence today support the IMAP protocol, which basically reads your email directly from the server rather than downloading it to your local computer first (like POP3 does). This is good for keeping your mail organized on a centralized server (good if you access your email from different computers). This is bad if you don't like to keep your Internet connection active while you read all your email. This is also bad if you are worried about your disk space, since all your old email saved on our servers will count towards your total.   

FTP Users FTP ( File Transfer Protocol) is something you're going to have to use to get your web site live on the web. It is a way to copy files from your home computer up to your directory on our web server. To connect, you'll need to know your server username and password. The name of the server you connect to is just yourdomain.com. If your domain hasn't been transferred to HostDemon yet, you can also connect directly to the server name (which is emailed to you when you sign up. When you've connected, you should see a directory on our server named Public_HTML. You should copy your web site into that directory, not the directory you start out in! If you have multiple domains with us all under the same server username, you'll see multiple directories when you first connect with your FTP program. Whenever you upload new data to your web site, the changes show up immediately on your live site (you may have to reload the page in your browser of course). You get unlimited FTP updates whenever you'd like (24/7/365) with all of our plans and you should name the main page of your site "index.html"... that's the one our server looks for when somebody goes to a URL (e.g. http://www.hostdemon.net) without specifying a filename (http://www.hostdemon.net/hosting.html).   

POP / SMTP Access POP3 is one of three ways you can access email in your mailboxes hosted with us (the other two being IMAP and web-based email). All email clients in existence today support the POP3 protocol, which downloads your mail from our server and copies it to your local hard drive. You can usually specify in your email client if you'd like a copy of the email to be kept on the mail server or not (or even to delete old mail only after a certain number of days). POP3 is nice if you don't want to stay connected to the Internet while reading and responding to your email: you can just connect, download the messages, disconnect, read and reply to your messages, re-connect, send the messages, and then disconnect! One problem with POP3 is if you decide to delete your old email from the server you won't have any old mail available to you when you try and check it via a different computer (or using the IMAP protocol or web-based email). On the other hand, this saves disk space on your plan! 

To send email from your email client, you need to specify an "SMTP" (outgoing mail) server. Almost always, your ISP provides you one can use, something like mail.comcast.net. Some ISPs, however, do not allow you to send mail using their SMTP server from a domain other than theirs! You're probably going to want to do that though, so we also provide an SMTP server to all our customers. It is simply mail.yourdomain.com, and as long as you have a single mailbox set up with us, it should work for you. We actually use "authenticated" SMTP, so that only HostDemon clients may use our SMTP server (which is why you have to have a mailbox set up for it to work!). Make sure you check off the appropriate box in your mail client for this (something like "my server requires authentication"). Unfortunately, some ISPs block SMTP requests to any SMTP server other than theirs! If your ISP does this, and also doesn't allow sending emails with a From field outside of their domain, simply direct your email client to use port 587 for outgoing email!   

IMAP Access IMAP is one of three ways you can access email in your mailboxes hosted with us (the other two being POP3 and web-based email). Most email clients in existence today support the IMAP protocol, which basically reads your email directly from the server rather than downloading it to your local computer first (like POP3 does). This is good for keeping your mail organized on a centralized server (good if you access your email from different computers). This is bad if you don't like to keep your Internet connection active while you read all your email. This is also bad if you are worried about your disk space, since all your old email saved on our servers will count towards your total. 

Web-Based Email Access We include squirrel, horde, and round cube with all our hosting packages. Web mail allows you to send and receive emails online by going to yoursite.com/webmail.

Spam Filtering - SpamAssassin If you enable Spam Assasin it will block most spam and unsolicited commercial email from reaching your e-mail While not completely perfect, and no spam filter ever truly is SpamAssassin can make a world of difference for cleaning up your inbox.   

Email Addresses (Aliases) Every HostDemon plan comes with unlimited email addresses @yourdomain.com! These addresses are configured through our web panel and can be set to go straight to a HostDemon mailbox or forward to another email address. One email address (also known as an email "alias") can be set to forward to any number of other addresses and mailboxes. You can also set an email address to just discard any mail sent to it (optionally bouncing back a failure message to the sender). Finally, you can set up a "catch-all" email address at your domain which will handle all mail sent to any address @yourdomain.com that you haven't specifically set up. Having your own domain means have more control over your email than most emails that come from your internet service provider (isp) or well known web based account you got for free.   

Auto Responders Every HostDemon plan comes with unlimited email auto-responders. You have the option to turn on an automatic response email for every email address you host with us. If you have one turned on, every time somebody sends an email to that address they'll immediately get a reply email with whatever message you choose. This is useful for automatic distribution of documents, "Thank you for for email, we'll get back to you soon" notices, customer support email addresses, newsletters, etc. You can add, remove, or change auto-responders at any time through your cPanel. You can make your auto-response email be plain text or HTML-encoded too!  

Mailing Lists 

Have a group of people you regularly email? Add them to a mailing list to email them at the same time, its faster and easier.

WHOIS Domain Listed Whenever a domain is registered. ICANN requires the registrant's contact information be made public via the "WHOIS" Internet service. This may seem like an invasion of privacy, but don't worry, it is illegal for anybody to use this public contact info for marketing purposes!

Unfortunately, nobody seems to care! Which means that as soon as you register a domain name, you start getting deluged with email spam, junk snail mail, and even telephone calls from telemarketers trying to sell products & services, scam you, or worse!

Which is why HostDemon offers the ability to use our "private register option", for contact information on all domains registered with us, ID Protection you're still in compliance with ICANN rules requiring posting legitimate contact information with all your domain registrations and you will still be master of your own domain.

Domains Hosted A domain name is something like hostdemon.net or gearandclip.com (special plug for my best friend Clarence B) or amazon.co.uk or apache.org. Domain hosting is what we do at HostDemon. In order to have a web site that is accessible on the Internet at all times, there are two separate things you need to do. First, you need to register your domain, and second, you've got to have it hosted somewhere. You can register your domain one place and host it somewhere else, though most web hosts offer domain registration as well. Without hosting, your domain is yours but you can't use it for email or displaying a web site on the Internet. Without registration, you can configure all your hosting and email preferences through your cPanel but it won't ACTUALLY work on the Internet.

Subdomains Hosted A normal domain name looks like www.domain.com a sub domain looks like sub.domain.com For example blog.hostdemon.net  is a sub domain name of our site www.hostdemon.net.

Domains Forwarded/Mirrored Domain Forwarding is a service we offer for any domains whose DNS is pointing to us. We can put up a default "coming soon" page at your web site, redirect visitors to a different URL, or mirror the content.

PHP5 Support PHP is a server side HTML embedded scripting language. We use version 4.4.4 and 5.2.0 (PHP5 should be available on all servers. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page; it now stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It works great with MySql Database and could be compared to Windows Web Servers running a Microsoft Access Database and ASP. PHP is a server-side script language that takes static html pages and makes them far more interactive. 

PERL Support Perl is one of the most common CGI scripting languages used today. We have version 5.8.7 currently installed on our servers.

Python Python is another programming/scripting language (like perl and PHP) that is popular for writing CGI scripts that can be used on many different computers and operating systems.   

Ruby on Rails Ruby On Rails is an open-source web freamework that's built for productivity. Here is a list of some of the stuff installed with our setup:

rake
actionmailer
actionpack
actionwebservice
activerecord
activesupport
gnuplot
mongrel
mysql
tidy
xml-simple
payment
BlueCloth
feedtools
htmltools

Full CGI Access Every HostDemon plan comes with full CGI (Common Gateway Interface) capabilities. CGI is what allows your site to have any sort of "programming" element to it, rather than just being a collection of static files (whether they be HTML, images, flash animation, video, music, word documents, etc...). CGI "scripts" can be written in just about any programming language (perl, python, c, c++ and more) as long as they read in input from an HTTP request and output text that a web browser can understand. There are thousands of already-written CGI scripts out there you can get and install on your site. More simply, a CGI script is a program intended to be run on the web. A CGI program can be written in any programming language, but Perl is one of the most popular. On our servers you will get a cgi-bin directory that your scripts should normally be uploaded to, however your CGI scripts will work both inside and outside of this directory.  

Cron Crontab is a process in Unix systems that uses a Daemon called cron to execute commands for the user at recurring time intervals. example: If a user had an automatic billing system setup, they might want to program using cron jobs to update them when a customer missed payments or when an automated backup has been completed and so on. 

Curl Curl is a command line tool for transferring files with url syntax.

GD is an ANSI library dynamic creation of images. GD creates PNG and JPEG images, among other formats. We stay up to date with the latest GD version.

Image Magick Image Magick is a program installed on our servers which lets you process images directly from CGI scripts and the command line. ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate an image in many formats. We stay up to date on the latest version.

FrontPage We support all version of Microsoft FrontPage. Frontpage is a website creation tool that can be used to both create and upload your site when FP extensions are installed.

Server Side Includes (SSI) Server Side includes, refers to Perl based HTML commands that direct a server to generate on-the-fly contact for web pages. Sort of a poor man's cgi in some sense. 

Shopping Carts Shopping carts we provide can be installed with a click of the mouse and will deliver the ultimate online shopping experience to your customers.

Unique IP Address Typically a number of web sites share the same IP address (a string of numbers like 74.102.27.52 used to identify a computer on the Internet). If you want to have an SSL certificate however, you'll need your own unique IP. Although we guarantee that your IP will be unique (nobody else will share the IP) we do not guarantee that your website will be dedicated. All plans reside on our shared servers. 

SSL Secure Certificate SSL (Secure Socket Layer) allows the server to establish a secure connection with the client's browser for encrypted transmission of sensitive data (e.g. credit card information). Because it requires a unique ip for its operation.

Enhanced Web Security Frequently monitored servers help defend against the most commonly seen web attacks.

Data Backup On every HostDemon plan we keep extensive back-ups of your data. Our control panel gives you the option to make an 'instant' backup of your entire cPanel account. It will archive your account and provide you with a link to download the backup. You can then use this backup file to restore your account on our servers if need be. This backup gets everything associated with your account: e-mail accounts (including the passwords and messages still on the system), FTP accounts, add-on/sub/parked domains, databases, mailing lists, EVERYTHING that is setup with the account. We recommend you always keep your OWN copy of your entire web site at a remote location as well, but we'll do our best to make sure that's never needed. There is no additional cost for these backup features. 

Daily Access Statistics We display in depth traffic statistics for your site you can update them real time at the click of a button! Get the most accurate Unique Visitors and Click Paths information in the industry. See where your traffic is coming from - search engines, banner ads, referrals, email campaigns and more! Analyze downloads, bandwidth usage, errors, and much more that is only possible with software-based web analytics.

Access to raw log files Every time somebody visits your web site, our server takes a log of it in either your access.log file or your error.log file (for times when people get errors like 404, etc... These logs are available for you to download at any time via FTP in the directory logs/yourdomain.com/http/ on our server. We rotate the logs every night so that access.log and error.log only contain today's logs, while error.log.0 and access.log.0 contain yesterdays (the last FULL day of logging available). After two days, we delete the log files. However, you can specify that we save log files for as long as 31 days from your cPanel. Normally, your log files do not count towards your disk usage total. If you tell us to save any extra logs though, those will count towards your total. To save you some disk space, we compress these files via "gzip". You can uncompress on your home computer with a program like winzip. You can only delete log files more than two days old from the server. We need the logs for the first few days to generate your site statistics!   

Banner/Ad-Free We do NOT place ads on your site and if you want to have commercial advertisements the choice is yours. In a few seconds you can replaced the default 404 page with your own (A 404 page is what loads when someone visits a page on your site that doesn't exist.) We recommend doing this to help maximize your traffic. You can see our support section or check out your cPanel for detailed instructions.

Passworded Directories (.htaccess) You can use .htaccess files on all HostDemon plans. .htaccess files are text files that you put in a directory of your web site to tell our web server (apache) that you'd like to handle request to that directory in a special way. There's lots you can do with a .htaccess file, but some of the most common uses are to password-protection, blocking access from a specific ip range or referring url, and redirecting requests to another URL. There's almost nothing you can't do with a simple .htaccess file, and there are lots of tutorials all over the web about how to use them!

Custom Error Pages Allows you to customize your own error pages like 404 (file not found), 500 (internal server error), 403 (forbidden), and 401 (failed authorization).   

Search Engine Submittal All search engines now have bots that will find your site automatically. To increase the amount of bots that find your site, get other sites to link to your site. HostDemon has many solutions to get the most out of your traffic.

Hotlink Protection Hotlinking is when another site is linking to your images or files. Hotlink protection will stop them from stealing your bandwidth.

Streaming Video and Music We support Windows Media, Quicktime, and Real Media player allowing you to run streaming audio and video.

Tomcat Java Servlet container and web server from the Jakarta project of the Apache software foundation. Tomcat is good choice for use as a web server for many applications; also if you want a free servlet and JSP engine. It can be used standalone or used behind traditional web servers such as Apache httpd, with the traditional server serving static pages and Tomcat serving dynamic servlet and JSP requests..

ODBC Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC)is a standard database access method to make it possible to access any data from any application, regardless of which database management system (DBMS) is handling the data.

One-Click Automatic Software Installers (Fantastico DeLuxe) Fantastico DeLuxe, our web-based one-click installer allows you to install some of today's most popular web applications to your website with, well, just one click! Over 50+ scripts to be installed such as.... Blogs, Portals/CMS, Customer Support, desks, forums, shopping carts, Image Galleries, Mailing Lists.

One-Click Automatic Software Installers (Plesk Application Pack) Plesk Application pack, our web-based one-click installer allows you to install some of today's most popular web applications to your website with, well, just one click! Over 28+ scripts to be installed such as.... Blogs, Portals/CMS, guestbook, counters, forums, shopping carts, Image Galleries, chat engines.