Answers to Questions

Understanding Hosting Plans

What is ‘bandwidth’ (or ‘data transfer’)?: Every time a visitor comes to your site, their computer requests Web pages, together with the images, animations, code, sound files, video files and so on that make up the pages. Your server sends them, as data whose volume can be measured. ‘Data transfer’ is the total volume of data your site is able to deliver each month.; The quota is usually calculated in gigabytes (GB), with 1 GB amounting to tens of thousands of requests for a Web page and its constituents. Our quotas are generous, and if you receive extraordinary numbers of visitors you can upgrade, so you should never need to worry!

What's an FTP account?: You may want visitors to your site either to upload files to it, or to download files from it (or both). An FTP account creates a folder on your site that allows visitors with a password to upload and download files.; You decide the password, and you issue it to visitors that you want to have this privilege (normally by e-mail).

What's an auto-responder?: You can set up some—or all—of your mailboxes so that they will send out an automated (pre-written) reply every time a message arrives. (‘Mailboxes’ are particular e-mail addresses.) A mail auto-responder is what does this for you.; May people use auto-responders when they go on holiday—but they have many other uses, and can be as complex as you like.

What's an e-mail forwarder?: You can set up some—or all—of your mailboxes so that any message that arrives is forwarded to another e-mail address. (‘Mailboxes’ are particular e-mail addresses.) An e-mail forwarder is what does this for you.

What's a spam filter?: ‘Spam’ is unsolicited junk e-mail. It is usually annoying and often offensive; it can can clog your e-mail inbox. A spam filter is a program that will capture e-mail messages that look like spam before they are sent to your inbox.; What is does with them after capture is something that you can decide.

What's a sub-domain?: If you have a site called ‘yourname.com’, visitors will normally call up www.yourname.com. However, you may have noticed that not all Web site addresses start with www.; If you wanted different groups to access different parts of your site (say customers and suppliers), you could set up sub-domains, called ‘customers’ and ‘suppliers’. Now visitors could call up customers.yourname.com or suppliers.yourname.com—and they would appear to the outside world to be different sites!

What's a parked domain?: You may own more than one domain name, and still want only one Web site. You can attach the additional domain name(s) to your working site, so that if a visitor calls up, say, otherdomain.com, they will get all the pages of your working site, with the otherdomain.com name in the location bar for each page, instead of yourdomain.com. It will look like a site of its own, and can be bookmarked and included in History lists as if it were a site in its own right.; The extra domains are described as ‘parked’.

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