Iceberg Hosting: Website Development and Hosting

Website Terms and Definitions

What do all these fancy website terms mean?

Domain Name: A domain name is the text that a person types into their web browser to visit a website. For example, company.com, organization,org, network.net, and yourdomain.com are all domain names.
Domain Name Registration: In order to legally "own" a domain name such as www.yourname.com, you must register the domain name. This registration is typically done once a year. Iceberg Hosting handles all Domain Name Registration for its customers, unless the domain name has been previously registered with another company. If you wish to transfer your Domain Name Registration to Iceberg Hosting, just let us know! All domain names registered through Iceberg Hosting are non-refundable.
Disk Storage: This is the amount of space allotted to your website hosting account. You can use this space to store html files, images, audio or video files, e-mail messages, MySQL databases, or other files that may be used on your website or for personal access. Personal Website Hosting accounts are allotted 150 MB of website storage space; Professional accounts are allotted 300 MB; Executive accounts are allotted 1000 MB.
Bandwidth: Every time you or someone else accesses your website, data is sent from the servers your website is hosted on to the Internet. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic (or total data sent) that your website generates. Iceberg Hosting allows 3GB of data transfer per month for Personal Website Hosting, and larger amounts of data transfer for Professional and Executive Hosting plans.
E-mail Addresses: You can use your e-mail address to send and receive messages, for free, over the Internet. With Iceberg Hosting's e-mail services, you can customize e-mail addresses for yourself, employees, or friends and family. Our Personal Website Hosting package offers 10 FREE e-mail addresses with your website.
FTP and FTP accounts: FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol." FTP is a way to transfer files from one computer to another. When you have a website, you can use FTP to put html files, images, videos, and other files from your computer onto your disk space for your website.

When you sign up for Website Hosting services with Iceberg Hosting, you will receive an FTP account name and password. Use this information to login using an FTP program and transfer files from your personal computer to your website.
Subdomains: Subdomains are individual website addresses that are added to a pre-existing domain name. For example, if your website was http://www.yourdomain.com, a subdomain would be http://sub.yourdomain.com.

All of Iceberg Hosting's Website Hosting services come with free subdomains for you to take advantages. If you are a business with many consultants, you could have www.yourbusiness.com be your website, and give each of your consultants their own website at consultant.yourbusiness.com.
Website Statistics: Your website statistics show you how much traffic your website generates, how people got to your website (through a search engine, or by a link from another webpage, etc.), and approximately where your website viewing audience is. You can also see which web browser people use to visit your website, and when your busiest viewing times are. Use information gained from your website statistics to tailor your website to your audience.
E-mail Spam Filtering: Most people with an e-mail address have received spam, or junk mail, messages. Your e-mail accounts all come with an optional spam mail filtering. This filter is very customizable, and is included for free with our Professional and Executive website hosting plans.
E-mail virus scanning: Some viruses are transmitted through e-mails, targeted to infect your computer. All of your Iceberg Hosting e-mail addresses come with FREE virus scanning. This virus scanning is automatically enabled, so you will never need to worry about reveiving a virus through your e-mail.
WebMail, POP3, IMAP: WebMail, POP3, and IMAP are three different ways that you can access your e-mail. You can use one method for checking your e-mail or a combination of methods. For example, you may use POP3 on your home/office computer, but use WebMail when you are travelling or want to read your e-mail from a different computer.

WebMail allows you to check your e-mail any time, anywhere. To access your e-mail via WebMail, simply go to www.yoursite.com/webmail and login with your e-mail username and password. You can set up an address book in WebMail, customize your mail options, send, receive, forward, save, and edit messages. One advantage to WebMail is that you can access your e-mail account from any computer with an Internet connection, any time of day! Please note: if you use POP3 on one computer, only your new e-mail messages will appear in WebMail.

POP3 is another way to access your e-mail. You can set up your e-mail account in your favorite mail program, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger, etc. When your e-mail account is set up as a POP3 account, all of your e-mails are stored directly on your computer. One advantage to a POP3 e-mail setup is that you can compose, read, and edit e-mails when you are not connected to the Internet.

IMAP is yet another way that you can access your e-mail. IMAP is similar to POP3 in that you set up your e-mail account in a mail program (such as Outlook). However, when your e-mail account is set up as an IMAP account, your messages are not saved directly on your computer - rather, they are kept on your mail server. IMAP is advantageous if you want to access your e-mail using a mail program on your home computer, but wish to keep all of your e-mails accessible through WebMail. Please note: If you have many e-mails, or e-mails with large files attached, your IMAP setup may be slow to respond at time. Also, e-mail messages do count towards your allotted disk space, so if you keep many large e-mails, you may reach your disk space quota quickly.
UNIX-based Servers: A server is the physical machine (computer) where your website files are stored. UNIX is one type of operating system that can be installed on a computer. All of the servers that Iceberg Hosting uses are operating on Red Hat Linux, one of the most stable server operating systems available. You can be sure that your website files are in good hands.
404 Error page: Have you ever tried to visit a website and instead received a page that says, Error 404: File not found? This is the error message that appears when someone tries to access a non-existent page on your website. You can customize this page to say whatever you want it to say - just edit the "missing.html" file in your home directory!
Server Side Includes: Your webpages can "pull in" content from other pages on your website if you use server side includes. Server Side Includes are very helpful if you want to generate many pages quickly, or if you have a menu on every page of your website that is constantly changing. Pages using server side includes must end in ".shtml" - for more information on how to use server side includes on your website, please feel free to contact Iceberg Hosting!
Frontpage 2002 Support: Frontpage is a website editing tool (Microsoft) that requires special extensions on your web server in order to properly function. All of your accounts include FrontPage extentions - just ask Iceberg Hosting if you wish to install them!
Password-Protected Directories: If you have certain pages on your website that you don't want to be accessed by the general public, you can set up a password for accessing those pages.
Secure Site Services: If you have an online ordering system, or need your website to be secure for other reasons, you can enable the secure website services. Ask Iceberg Hosting for more information.
Perl, CGI, PHP, Python, TCL: These are all different programming languages that can be used to write websites. Software for handling files written in these languages is installed on the servers Iceberg Hosting uses for website hosting.
MySQL Database: Data can be stored in a database for easy access and to speed up searching and retrieving files. Iceberg Hosting offers support for MySQL databases. One free MySQL database comes with our Executive Website Hosting plan; ask Iceberg Hosting for more information on databases.