Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that can travel a communications path in a given time, usually measured in seconds. If you think of the communications path as a pipe, then bandwidth represents the width of the pipe that determines how much data can flow through it all at once.

A cookie is a file sent to a web browser by a web server that is used to record one's activities on a website. For instance, when you buy items from a site and place them in a so-called virtual shopping cart, that information is stored in the cookie. When the browser requests additional files, the cookie information is sent back to the server. Cookies can remember other kinds of personal information, such as your password, so you don't have to re-enter it each time you visit the site; and your preferences, so the next time you return to a site, you can be presented with customized information. Some people regard cookies as an invasion of privacy; others think they are a harmless way to make websites more personal.

Most cookies have an expiration date and either reside in your computer's memory until you close your browser or saved to your hard drive. By the way, cookies cannot read information stored in your computer.

DOMAIN NAME

This is the name that identifies an Web site. For example, "microsoft.com" is the domain name of Microsoft's Web site. A single Web server can serve Web sites for multiple domain names, but a single domain name can point to only one machine. For example, Apple Computer has Web sites at www.apple.com, www.info.apple.com, and store.apple.com. Each of these sites could be served on different machines.

DOWNLOAD MANAGERS

Download manager is a program aimed at helping you download files from the Internet. This program is faster than Internet Explorer. It allows you to easily download files and recover (resume downloading) if errors like connection or server binding problems occur. Download manager improves on the ability of your web browser's built in downloading by supporting graceful error recovery, download resuming, download acceleration, scheduling, and many other advanced downloading features.
This way it is not necessary to start downloading again from the beginning from the beginning, what can make you gain a lot of time for big files.

Flash, a popular authoring software developed by Macromedia, is used to create vector graphics-based animation programs with full-screen navigation interfaces, graphic illustrations, and simple interactivity in an antialiasing, resizable file format that is small enough to stream across a normal modem connection. The software, currently in version 7.0, is ubiquitous on the Web, both because of its speed (vector-based sites, which can adapt to different display sizes and resolutions, play as they download) and for the smooth way it renders graphics. Flash files, unlike animated but raster graphics Graphics Interchange Format and JPEG, are compact, efficient, and designed for optimized delivery

FRAMES

HTML frames allow authors to present documents in multiple views, which may be independent windows or subwindows. Multiple views offer designers a way to keep certain information visible, while other views are scrolled or replaced. For example, within the same window, one frame might display a static banner, a second a navigation menu, and a third the main document that can be scrolled through or replaced by navigating in the second frame. If the user agent can't display frames or is configured not to, it will render the contents of the <noframes> element.

Technically, this term refers to the number of files that are downloaded from a web server. Keeping track of hits is a way of measuring traffic to a website that can be misleading. The number of hits a site receives is usually much greater than the number of actual visitors. That's because a web page can contain more than one file. For example, each graphic element is a separate file, so a page with nine graphics would count as ten hits, one for each graphic and one for the HTML file. In this scenario, a page may have 10,000 hits, but only 1,000 visits. However, the program considers "a hit" as one page view.

HOME PAGE

A home page serves as the website's introduction, first page, starting point, or guide. Most of the sites main navigation is available from this page and is many times mirrored on other pages throughout the site. Most often it is index.html, index.htm, default.htm, default.html or any of the variations of index or default with the extension php or asp depending on the platform used in creating the website.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for creating web pages, that is, information presented on the World Wide Web. Defined as a simple "application" of SGML, which is used by organizations with complex publishing requirements, HTML is now an Internet standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The most recent version is HTML 4.01, though it has been superseded by XHTML.

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol -- the method used to transfer hypertext files across the Internet. On the World Wide Web, pages written in HTML use hypertext to link to other documents. When you click on hypertext, you jump to another web page, sound file, or graphic.

Hypertext transfer is simply the transfer of hypertext files from computer to computer. Hypertext transfer protocol is the set of standards used by computers to transfer hypertext files (web pages) over the Internet.

IP ADDRESS

An IP address is a unique number, akin to a telephone number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet using the Internet Protocol. This allows machines passing the information onwards on behalf of the sender to know where to send it next, and for the machine receiving the information to know that it is the intended destination.

An example IP address is 207.44.144.14. Converting to such numbers from the more human-readable form of domain addresses, such as net-promoter, is done via the Domain Name System. The process of conversion is known as resolution of the domain name.

A network-oriented programming language invented by Sun Microsystems that is specifically designed for writing programs that can be safely downloaded to your computer through the Internet and immediately run without fear of viruses or other harm to our computer or files. Using small Java programs (called "Applets"), Web pages can include functions such as animations, calculators, and other fancy tricks. We can expect to see a huge variety of features added to the Web using Java, since you can write a Java program to do almost anything a regular computer program can do, and then include that Java program in a Web page.

JavaScript is a platform-independent, event-driven, interpreted programming language developed by Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems. JavaScript is useful for adding interactivity to the World Wide Web because scripts can be embedded in HTML files (i.e., web pages) simply by enclosing code in a <SCRIPT> </SCRIPT> tag pair. All modern browsers can interpret JavaScript -- albeit with some irritating caveats.

LOG FILE

A server log is a file (or several files) automatically created and maintained by a server of activity performed by the server.

A typical example is a web server log which maintains a history of page requests. The W3C maintains a standard format (http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-logfile) for web server log files, but other proprietary formats exist. More recent entries are appended to the end of the file. Information about the request, including client IP address, request date/time, page requested, HTTP code, bytes served, user agent, and referer. These data can be combined into a single file, or separated into distinct logs, such as an access log, error log, referer log. However, server logs typically do not collect user-specific information.

These files are usually not accessible to general Internet users, only to the webmaster or other administrative person. A statistical analysis of the server log may be used to examine traffic patterns by time of day, day of week, referer, or user agent. Efficient web site administration and adequate hosting resources can be aided by analysis of the web server logs.

Parsing data refers to the process by which programming data input is broken into smaller, more distinct chunks of information that can be more easily interpreted and acted upon.

Acronym: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. You create pages with PHP and HTML. When a visitor opens the page, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor's browser, just as with ASP or ColdFusion. Unlike ASP or ColdFusion, however, PHP is Open Source and cross-platform. PHP runs on Windows NT and many Unix versions, and it can be built as an Apache module and as a binary that can run as a CGI.

REFERRER

The referer field is a field that each HTTP request pass, and it is logged by most log formats. This field tells you where the request comes from. If your URL was manually typed or was called from a bookmark, the referer field will be blank ("-"). If the hits was made from a clicked hyperlink, the referer field will contain the URL of the page containing that hyperlink.

SEARCH ENGINE

A search engine is a type of software that creates indexes of databases or Internet sites based on the titles of files, keywords, or the full text of files. The search engine has an interface that allows you to type what you're looking for into a blank field. It then gives you a list of the results of the search. When you use a search engine on the Web, the results are presented to you in hypertext, which means you can click on any item in the list to get the actual file.

SESSION

Session is the total of all pages/files that the user downloaded during his visit to the site and displayed in time period. Unlike hits, sessions are tracked by a cookie and can be recorded only in Site Statistics log.

A spider or Web crawler is a program that exhaustively surfs all the links from a page and returns them to another program for processing. For example, all of the Internet search engine sites rely on spider robots to discover new Web sites and add them to their index. Another typical use of a spider is by a publisher against his or her own site. The spider program makes sure that all of the links function correctly and reports dead links.

SUBDOMAIN

Also called a child domain , a domain that is part of a larger domain name in DNS hierarchy. DNS hierarchy consists of the root-level domain at the top, underneath which are the top-level domains, followed by second-level domains and finally subdomains. For example, in the domain name office.microsoft.com , "office" is a subdomain of the larger second-level domain "microsoft.com."

TOP LEVEL DOMAIN

Top-level Domain TLDs are the names at the top of the DNS naming hierarchy. They appear in domain names as the string of letters following the last (rightmost) ".", such as "net" in "www.example.net". The administrator for a TLD controls what second-level names are recognized in that TLD. The administrators of the "root domain" or "root zone" control what TLDs are recognized by the DNS. Commonly used TLDs include .com, .net, .edu, .jp, .de, etc.

WEB SERVER

The term web server can mean one of two things:

1. a computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers;
2. a software program that serves web documents.

Every web server (sense 1) is running a web server program (sense 2).

USER AGENT

A user agent is a software program that can send requests to a web server and receive responses to those requests. This is precisely what a browser does. But there are also automatic programs known as robots that are user agents. Further, web caching servers can send requests to a web server and receive responses to those requests. They generally do this on behalf of other user agents, but could in some cases do it on their own behalf (for example during pre-emptive caching) in which case they would behave like user agents. Seen from the perspective of the web server, all user agents look the same. It is not immediately obvious to the server if it is being visited by a human-driven browser or by an automated retrieval system. So we refer to all of them as user agents.

USER AGENT STRING

The string sent by a device/client in an http header in a client server http request which is used to uniquely determine what type of device and with what software the server is communicating with.

This for example in a web-browser request would normally include the platform / operating system the client is running, the type and version number of web browser. The User Agent String is stored in server log files and can be easily extracted for analysis.