Internet Glossary
Unfamiliar or unclear about a term or concept related to Web hosting services or Domain registration? This glossary gives meaning to much of the commonly used vocabulary associated with Web Hosting and the Internet. Simply click on any alphabetical category to quickly find the word you're looking for.
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B2B / Business To Business
Describes the exchange of money or information between businesses. Although most of the attention in the e-commerce world is currently focused on consumer shopping ventures, most analysts predict that the biggest money will be spent (and earned) in the business sector.
Backbone
A large transmission line carrying enormous amounts of Internet traffic over long distances.
Backup
A copy of disk files stored on tape or on another physical disk to prevent permanent data loss.
Bandwidth
A measure of the range of frequencies that an electronic signal occupies on a given communications channel. The greater the range of frequencies, the more data and thus information can be transmitted in a given time.
Bandwidth (Web Hosting)
How much is a gigabyte (1 GB) of bandwidth? For e.g. If an average web page, images and all is 50 kilobytes in size, your website could be viewed 20,000 times! For the average hobby website, that is more than enough. If each visitor to your website viewed an average of 4 pages per month, it would still represent over 5,000 unique visitors to your website every month. Beware of bandwidth usage when offering file downloads.
While a simple web page doesn't use up much bandwidth, the same can't be said about downloading files. If you plan on allowing people to download music files, pdf files, flash files, or video files, you can exhaust your bandwidth in a hurry even with a relatively small number of people visiting your website. If your website offers an adobe .pdf file that is 1 megabyte in size, with one gigabyte of bandwidth, you will only be able to serve up one thousand downloads. This does not including the html needed to get people to download the pdf in the first place.
Video files exhaust even more space. A one megabyte (1 MB) video file represents only seconds of video. For a half hour presentation, your video file could easily be over two hundred megabytes in size! At that size, one gigabyte would only allow you to offer five downloads to your visitors. What you plan to do with your website most definitely will affect how much monthly bandwidth you anticipate needing.
Baud
The rate at which bits are transmitted over a communication link. Baud is the number of transitions (that are used to encode bits) that take place in one second.
Banner
Banner is an advertising graphic, usually in the form of a gif image.
BBS / Bulletin Board System
A BBS is a computer that can be reached by computer modem dialing (and, in some cases, by Telnet) for the purpose of sharing or exchanging messages or other files. Some BBS's are devoted to specific interests; others offer a more general service.
BCC / Blind Carbon Copy
A copy of an e-mail sent to a third party without notifying the cc recipient.
B Channel
Bearer Channel. It is a 64 Kbps communication channel in ISDN.
Binary File
Technically, a file in which all eight bits of its component bytes are used for data. The binary file content must be interpreted by a program that understands in advance exactly how it is formatted.
BinHex
BinHex is a utility for converting (encoding) Macintosh files into text that will travel well on networks either as files or e-mail attachments
Bit
A bit is the smallest unit of data in a computer, comprising of either a 1 or 0. Bits are the building blocks of Internet data.
Bit rate
The speed at which bits are transmitted over a communication link. Expressed in bits per second (bps).
Bitmap
A computerized image made up of dots or pixels. Line art and photos are often saved as bitmaps. To keep art work from looking jagged, bitmaps should be saved a minimum of 1200 dots per inch (dpi). Common types of bitmap graphics are GIF, JPEG, Photoshop, PCX, TIFF, Macintosh Paint, bmp, PNG, and TGA.
BITNET
(Because It's Time NETwork ) or (Because It's There NETwork) -- A network of educational sites separate from the Internet, but e-mail is freely exchanged between BITNET and the Internet. Listservs , the most popular form of e-mail discussion groups, originated on BITNET. BITNET machines are usually mainframes running the VMS operating system, and the network is probably the only international network that is shrinking .
Bluetooth
A computing and telecommunications industry specification that describes how electronic devices such as mobile and computer can be connected across radio waves.
Bookmark
A saved link to a website address, kept by a browser as part of a list of favorite sites.
Boolean
This term refers to the logic computers use to determine if a statement is true or false. There are 4 main Boolean operators: AND, NOT, OR, and XOR. Whenever you see a Web search tool or database query system that allows you to use AND, OR, and NOT to hone your search, the chances are it uses Boolean techniques. The most common Boolean operators are AND (you're looking for all terms), OR (you're looking for at least one of the terms), and NOT (you're excluding a term). You'll always see the operators referred to in uppercase letters, although you usually don't need to enter them that way to make a Boolean search work properly.
Bourne Shell
A common UNIX shell.
Bot
An automated piece of software that can be used in chat rooms or to crawl the web.
BPS / Bits Per Second
Used to denote the speed of data transfer. Used interchangeable with "baud" in most cases.
Bridge
A device that connects a Local Area Network to another Local Area Network using the same protocol, such as TCP/IP or Ethernet.
Basic Rate Interface (BRI)
A BRI line is one of two access methods for ISDN (the other one is Primary Rate Interface - PRI). A BRI has two 64 Kbps B channels and one 16 Kbps D channel.
Broadband
Broadband is a high speed data transmission network in which several parallel channels pass over a single communications medium.
Broadcast
This is a service in which information is sent from a central source to multiple destinations.
Browser
Client software that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources. Examples include Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator.
Browser sniffing
The process in which the web site tries to determine what kind of web browser the user is using. This is done to suit the website to the particular capabilities of the browser.
BSD / Berkeley Source Distribution
The versions of UNIX developed and distributed by the University of California at Berkeley . Many commercial UNIX implementations such as SunOS and Dynix are derived from it.
BTW
(By The Way) -- A shorthand appended to a comment written in an online forum.
Budget Hosting
Budget Hosting often describes the affordable services of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more Web sites on web server at high speed Internet connection.
Burn Rate
The rate at which a new company or venture spends its capital while waiting for profitability. Most Internet start-up companies are will acquainted with this term, which is widely used in an industry where money is routinely spent much faster than it is earned.
Burst
In web hosting, burst is when a client suddenly uses more bandwidth than is expected under its contract. Typically, the web hosting company expects this to happen occasionally and has set fees for the client depending on the bandwidth used.
Byte
Eight bits (see BIT)
Byte code
The constituent code in a java program file.
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