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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C Shell
A common UNIX shell originating on Berkeley UNIX
C++
An object-oriented programming language. Bjarne Stroustrop created c++ at Bell Labs in the 1980s as the successor to C, the most popular language for writing software for PCS.
CA / Certification Authority
A secure third-party organization that can verify the identity and origin of a person or component (such as ActiveX controls). VeriSign is the leading CA.
Cable Modem
A MODEM enabling the connection of a PC to a local cable television line. Cable modems provide fast, always-on connections to the Internet in areas where the necessary coaxial cable has been laid.
Cache
An area on a computer's hard disk used by a Web Browser to store recently downloaded pages. When a user returns to a stored page, it is retrieved from the cache rather than the original Internet Server, loading the page faster and reducing the load on the network.
Carrier
A steady electronic signal into which information is encoded through changes in the frequency or amplitude of the signal. It is also used to describe any company that sells or rents telecommunications services.
Catch-all Email Account
A type of email account designed to "catch" any email messages addressed to your domain (@yourdomain.com) but not addressed to an actual POP3 email account or email alias. The account can also catch misspellings of your email address and redirect the email to your account. Every hosting plan comes with one catch-all account as well as a certain number of POP3 email accounts.
CC / Carbon Copy
A copy of an e-mail message sent to one or more recipients other than the main addressee. The other recipients' addresses appear in the cc box at the top of the message so the principal recipient can see who else it was sent to.
CCIT
Comity Consultative International Telegraphique et Telephonique (International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee) International telecommunication standards body
CDA / Communications Decency Act
Part of the Telecommunications Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 but overturned by the courts in 1997. Regarded by opposition groups as a violation of the First Amendment, the CDA was criticized for the vagueness of definition of some key terms and its potential use as a means for the government to prosecute over any online activity of which it disapproved.
Channel Definition Format (CDF)
A way of defining the server-push channels for accessing frequently changing web content.
Censorship
The growth of the Internet has highlighted issues of censorship, which is the banning of material considered to be against public interest. Child Pornography, terrorism and other crimes have kept the censorship issue on the agenda of many governments, despite its inherent problems.
Certificate
Digital ID used for SSL transactions. It includes owner's public key, the name of the owner, the issuer, hostname, and the expiration date.
Certificate Authority
An issuer of Security Certificates used in SSL connections .
CERN / European Council for Nuclear Research
Initials originally from Counsel European pour la Recherché Nucleaire. The European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN is famed as the origin of the World Wide Web. An initiative to improve collaboration among workers in the physics community, led by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, led directly to the development of HTML, HTTP, the first text-only browser and the first Web server.
CFML / Cold Fusion Markup Language
An extension of HTML, A proprietary markup language used by Allaire's Cold Fusion to link HTML pages to database servers. CFML goes beyond database management to fill some important gaps in HTML, including session variables, branching logic, loops, and other constructs that programmers are accustomed to using, such as error trapping and debugging tools.
CGI / Common Gateway Interface
A protocol that helps to extend the capabilities of otherwise dumb Web pages. CGI links a Web page to a small computer program that performs a specific task, such as processing the contents of the form and sending back a confirmation message.
CGI-BIN
The directory where executable files (Perl / C) are stored
Chat
One of the most popular uses of the Internet, particularly among newcomers, and widely regarded as the driving force behind the success of AOL.
CHAP
(Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol) An authentication protocol used in PPP protocol, Uses a username and a password
Churn
The rate at which customers abandon subscriptions to a service, usually in favor of a competitor. Churn is an unfortunate fact of life in the ISP business.
Circuit-Switched
Describes a network in which the two ends of a connection are linked by a fixed circuit, For the duration of this connection the communicating parties have exclusive use of the bandwidth it provides
CISCO
The company that connects up the majority of the world's networks. The California company, with revenue now measured in billions of dollars, started life at Stanford University , where Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack worked out a way to connect up the computer systems in different buildings on campus.
Clickstream
A record of the clicks made as Web users travel within and between sites, and thus a record of the pages visited and the order in which they were visited. Web marketers and advertisers use clickstream information to determine the popularity of site sections, time spent on various activities, usability of individual features and the response to banner advertisements.
Clickthrough
An advertising term for a single instance of a click on an advertisement. Clickthroughs are regarded as a better way of measuring and paying for audience response than the number of impressions, as they imply real interest on the part of the viewer.
Client / Server
Describes a computing model in which one program, a client, requests information from another, a server. The client/server model is one of the most important concepts in network computing, as it provides a good way for organizations to make use of programs and data that are distributed widely across different machines or networks.
Clustering
Connecting many computers and making them appear as one machine. This is done to increase reliability and performance.
CName / Canonical Name
This is an alias pointing to the true name of the host. Requires its right hand side to have an address record.
Cobalt RaQ
Server appliance made by Cobalt specifically for hosting companies. Newest RaQs are Linux-based and provide an easy-to-use interface. RaQs have no features that can't be had in a regular Linux box but they offer pre-installed programs and Cobalt's support
Cold Fusion
Cold Fusion, made by Allaire, is a popular and sophisticated set of products for building Web site and serving page to users. With Cold Fusion, a company can build a content database using input template and combine these with application programs to create a Web site in which pages are developed dynamically as they are served. Cold Fusion has its own page markup language, called Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML). CFML encompasses the Web's Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
Collage
A synchronous collaborative data analysis tool for use over the Internet, from NCSA.
Co-location
Many service providers now offer co-location services, which allow you to place your server at their site, on their network, and linked to their connection.
Co-Location Hosting
This hosting option allows you to place your server at their site, on their network, and linked to their connection. Administration is done remotely so that a customer far away can configure and control their equipment.
COM / Component Object Model
A complex set of technologies developed by Microsoft for allowing pieces of software known as components or objects to work together. COM sets common standards that allow unrelated bits of code to talk to each other.
Community
A collection of individuals or users of a website, mailing list or newsgroup, generally united through a common interest, community-building is one of the biggest challenges faced by website owners, for whom unclicked banners, empty chat rooms and discussion groups, or unclaimed web space presage doom. The rules for encouraging the development and retention of such communities are not clearly defined, and many theories circulate about how best to attempt this. Howard Rheingold's book Virtual Communities, available online, provides one of the best such discussions.
Compression
A technique for reducing the size of files, commonly used to speed transmission and download times. Most compression algorithms work by removing or replacing redundant information from text or binary files, such as blank space or often-repeated characters.
CompuServe
A pioneering online service. CompuServe has a special place in the hearts of internet old-timers -- for many it was their first experience of e-mail and chat.
Command-line interface
The opposite of the GUI (Graphical User Interface). A way of interacting with a computer system using the keyboard and a text-only display. Usually more powerful, but less user-friendly than a GUI.
Control Panel
A control panel should be able to help to manage your web site, without having to know all of the commands or/and contact customer support. For example, you are able to use control panel to set mail forwarding options, enable/disable anonymous FTP access, view your statistics, and change your password and more.
Convergence
The coming together of disparate technologies, such as internet services, television and other forms of entertainment. Nearly everyone knows how to work a television set, but PCS are much harder for them to master. It makes sense, then, for the television to act as a central source of digital information, whether it is e-mail, the web, satellite and cable television, video-on-demand or video games.
Contact Record
In the case of many registries, contact information for technical, billing and administrative purposes are maintained in their database. It is important to keep your contact records updated to ensure that billing and renewal can proceed without problems.
Cookie
texts file left by a website on a hard disk. Cookies record information about site visitors, especially information that can be used to make life easier for users on subsequent visits. When a visitor returns, the site retrieves the cookie and reads it for password or login information, user-configured preference such as page layout, or credit card numbers, for example. Advertisers and webmasters make extensive use of cookies to track the behavior of site visitors, noting the sections and pages that they visit, keeping track of dead-ends that force users to go back on themselves and watching their response to banner advertising.
Copyleft
A software licensing scheme in which programs can be modified, redistributed or even sold, with the proviso that anyone who does so also passes on the freedom to make further changes.
Copyright
The issue of who owns what on the internet is, unsurprisingly, a complex one. Like obscenity laws, copyright laws differ from country to country, making regulation on the internet difficult. The internet has also thrown up some new and effectively ungovernable ways of distributing copyrighted material.
CORBA / Common Object Request Broker Architecture
A set of standards enabling object-oriented programs to work together over networks, irrespective of where they are or who designed them.
Cracker
Someone who breaks into someone else's computer system, usually on a network.
Crawler
A program that visits Web pages and reads their contents, usually on behalf of a search engine responding to a request from a website owner. Once read, the information is returned to the search engine, indexed and made generally available to the outside world.
Cron
The clock daemon in UNIX that executes commands at specified dates and times according to instructions in a file.
Cross-platform
Software and network systems designed to work on any hardware type or with any operating system. Internet protocols, for example, work independently of any specific kind of computer hardware or operating system. Cross-platform design means that incompatible kinds of hardware can be linked by a common way of exchanging or moving bits.
CSS / Cascading Style Sheets
A feature being added to HTML to give both Web site developers and users more control over how pages are displayed. With CSS, designers and users can create style and appear. These style sheets can then be applied to any Web page. The term cascading derives from the fact that multiple style sheets can be applied to the same Web page. CSS was developed by the W3C.
CUI / Character-based User Interface
This is a computer control system that makes the user type in commands (characters) to operate the computer. This is the opposite of GUI, which uses pictures, or icons, to help the user operate the computer.
Custom MX and A records
MX Record (Mail Exchange Record) - Mail Server records designate the mail servers that will handle mail for a given domain. Should a user have more than one mail server, MX records can also specify the order in which the mail servers will be used as primary, secondary, backup and so on. An A record is a DNS Address resource record. It maps a host's name to its address and specifies the Internet Protocol address (in dotted decimal form) of the host. Each host address should have one A record.
Custom Error 404 page
A HTML Error 404 means a request was made for a file (or an object) and it was not found on the queried server. The most common reasons for such an error are: Moved pages, renamed pages, general user or server mistyping, and also the fact that some operating systems are case sensitive.
Cyberpunk
Someone dedicated to the use of cryptography to build anonymous, private communications systems.
Cyberspace
The imagined space of graphically represented data in a global computer network. Coined by William Gibson in the novel Neuromancer (1984).
Cybersquatting
The act of registering a company name as a domain name by someone outside the company in hopes of selling it to the company for a profit. Anti-cybersquatting legislation has been introduced to make it illegal.
Cyborg / Cybernetic Organism
Part organic, part inorganic or machine. The cyborg has become a metaphor for a group of ideas pertaining to human-machine interfaces and organic-inorganic combinations as well as for hybrid identities formed in contemporary electronic media culture.
Cybraian
A librarian or researcher specializing in the Internet, rather than books, as a source of information.
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