Hosting Glossary

[Sudhakar]

Glossary

Bandwidth - The size of files that are downloaded from your sites multiplied by the amount of visitors. For example, let us say that you have five pages on your website, each the size of 150KB (including the size of the actual page and the images). Let us say two visitors take a look at each page, plus they downloads a file that is 5MB in size from one of the pages. That means:

(0.15MB x 5 pages) * 2 people + 5MB * 2 people and you get 11.5MB of bandwidth used by those two people. The 0.15MB is 150KB converted to megabytes. If around 2,000 people visited each page of your website and downloaded the file, you would use about 10 GB of bandwidth. Without the file,
you could have 14, 000 visitors! 

Data Center - The data center is a term that usually refers to the physical location of the server that websites are hosted on. Servers of any professional company are always located in a data center because internet speed (such as Cable, DSL and even T3) at home or small office is not enough to allow for the fast loading of websites. Data centers also provide more redundancy that allows servers to remain up in-case of emergencies.

Domain Name - Can also be called domain for short. This term refers to the address of the website. Take Google for example, the domain name is Google.com. The domain name of this forum is webhostingtalk.com. Domain names are case insensitive.

Downtime - Refers to the amount of time that your website is unreachable to people across the internet. Most commonly, 'Page Cannot Be Displayed' error will be returned. 

Overselling - The practice of selling customers more bandwidth, space or other resources than you actually have. Let us say that you have an 83 GB hard-drive. It would be overselling if you sold your customers any more than 83 GB of space, even if they are using only 10 GB in reality. This would cause problems if some of the customers decided to use the entire amount that was purchased by them, the server would run out of space. Same applies for bandwidth. For CPU, the more websites you put on a server, the slower it runs.

Uptime - Refers to the amount of time that people can access your site on the internet; the amount of time that your website is working properly.