Making Sense of Ecommerce Web Hosting
A Home Business Article Contributed by Sharon Hill
What's All This Mean - Some Ecommerce Web Hosting Terminology
Explained below are some common ecommerce web hosting terms that you will want to know before choosing an ecommerce web host for your business site.
Essential Ecommerce Web Hosting Terms
File Extensions - Ever look at what's in, for instance, your computer's C drive? You might see documents and other files, that end in .exe or .doc. These little three letter codes are your file extensions. They tell your computer what kind of file it is and which program to use to open it. Your computer would know, for instance, through the file extension, that a .html file couldn't be opened by Word.
FTP - Stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is the way files are moved from one computer to another. Your ecommerce web site's host would use FTP as a means of getting your Internet pages up on the world wide web.
GIF - Graphics Interchange Format is one of the two most popular formats for sending graphics and photos across the web and e-mail. It is a 356 color CompuServe product.
GUI - This is an acronym for Graphical User Interface. Basically, the GUI is the part of the web pages you see - the text, the buttons, the banners, the art. Everything that surrounds this Internet-visible part of your ecommerce web hosted site in your browser is interface that makes it possible for you to view the web pages on a site.
Hex - Short for hexadecimal, this is the format that determines web page colors. It is hexadecimal because the format is made up of six characters, three groups of two. Each group of two indicates one of the three primary colors - red, green and blue, referred to as RGB. The range of choices is 0-9 and F. All zero's, as in 000000 is Black, all FFFFFF is white. FF0000 is brightest red, while 339900 is the color of pea soup. With hex you can order 216 different colors.
* Two Most Vital Ecommerce Web Hosting Terms
HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. This is the language of the Internet. It is the code that you must learn in order to produce a web site. Hypertext is the process of traveling from page to page by way of links and arrows. Markup is the format for text layout, the commands around the text that tell your ecommerce web host how the text should look. , for instance, is the HTML code for bold, while is the text markup command for italics.
IP - Short for Internet Protocol. This is a set of 12 numbers arranged in 4 sets of 3's, divided by a dot (period.) For instance, 123.456.789.345 is an IP. When you enter a domain name(URL) into a browser your computer goes out and looks for the IP address that belongs to that address, so that you don't have to memorize a bunch of 12 digit numbers. After all, it's far easier to remember www.cnn.com than a set of 12 numbers which is CNN's Internet Protocol.
