E-Mail Auto Responders

Auto responders may be used to send automated responses to incoming e-mail sent to a specific address. An auto responder could be used to send a standard messages.

Email Forwarding

Having email automatically sent (forwarded) from one (or more) email address, to another (possibly more than one) email address that you specify. If a person has `unlimited email forwarding`, then an email of the form, anything@you.com will be sent to forwarding address. For example, Support@you.com, Webmaster@you.com etc., will all be sent to the account specified to be sent to.

Farm

A server farm is a group of load-balanced servers IP addresses or server names. The farm is identified by a virtual IP address or a virtual server name and may contain many different physical “member servers”. Depending on the complexity of your requirements a single farm may contain various services such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, streaming audio/video, etc. all within itself or you may have separate farms associated with each service you wish to load balance.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol) — A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. Click to know more on FTP

Fault tolerance

The ability of a system to respond to unexpected hardware or software failure is its fault tolerance.

FDDI

(Fiber Distributed Data Interface) — A standard for transmitting data on optical fiber cables at a rate of around 100,000,000 bits-per-second (10 times as fast as Ethernet, about twice as fast as T-3).

Finger

An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests.

Gateway

The technical meaning is a hardware or software set-up that translates between two dissimilar protocols, for example Prodigy has a gateway that translates between its internal, proprietary e-mail format and Internet e-mail format. Another, sloppier meaning of gateway is to describe any mechanism for providing access to another system, e.g. AOL might be called a gateway to the Internet.

Gigabyte (GB)

A gigabyte is a measure of storage capacity and is roughly a billion bytes. Specifically, it is 1024 Megabytes.

Gigabits per second (Gbps)

Currently, Gigabits per second is the fastest measure bandwidth, and is most commonly associated with high speed networks, such as Ethernet. A Gigabit equals 1 billion bits, or 1,000,000,000 bits.

Gopher

A widely successful method of making menus of material available over the Internet. Gopher is a Client and Server style program, which requires that the user have a Gopher Client program. Although Gopher spread rapidly across the globe in only a couple of years, it has been largely supplanted by Hypertext, also known as WWW (World Wide Web). There are still thousands of Gopher Servers on the Internet.

Guest book

A script on a web page with a form which allows your website visitors to sign in, and leave comments or questions.

.htaccess

The default name of a configuration file that contains server directives (small commands known by the server) that tell the server how to behave. A .htaccess file is used to restrict access (password-protection) to specific files and/or directories on the Internet or an intranet.

Hit

As used in reference to the World Wide Web, ‘hit’ means a single request from a web browser for a single item from a web server; thus in order for a web browser to display a page that contains 3 graphics, 4 ‘hits’ would occur at the server: 1 for the HTML page, and one for each of the 3 graphics. ‘hits’ are often used as a very rough measure of load on a server, e.g. ‘Our server has been getting 300,000 hits per month.

Home Page

Several meanings. Originally, the web page that your browser is set to use when it starts up. The more common meaning refers to the main web page for a business, organization, person or simply the main page out of a collection of web pages, e.g. ‘Check out so-and-so’s new Home Page.

Host

Any computer on a network which provides disk storage or services to other computers on the network. It is quite common to have one host machine provide several services, such as WWW and E-MAIL.

Hosting

This term can be used to refer to the housing of a web site, email or a domain. Hosting Every website, email, file, or online service is stored (called `hosted`) on a computer (called a server) which is connected to the Internet.

Hosting Provider

A company which provides web space to individuals and other companies.

HTTP(HyperText Transport Protocol)

HTTP Hypertext transfer protocol (http) is the set of rules for exchanging files on the world wide web. The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. Requires a HTTP client program on one end, and an HTTP server program on the other end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW).