Knowledgebase

U

UNIX (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with small caps) – a family of multi-user, multitasking operating systems originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs. UNIX was one of the first operating systems to be written in a high-level programming language – C. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used multi-user general-purpose operating system in the world and it still leads the industry as the most common operating system for Web servers. There are now many versions of UNIX which can be used on many different platforms. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification are qualified to use the trademark; others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like". Unix-like operating systems include AIX, A/UX, BSD, Debian, FreeBSD, GNU, HP-UX, NetBSD, NEXTSTEP, OpenBSD, OPENSTEP, OSF, POSIX, RISCiX, Solaris, SunOS, System V, Ultrix, USG Unix, Version 7, Xenix.

URL- Uniform Resource Locator – is an address of documents or other resources in the Internet. It consists of the following parts: protocol://host /location. The first part (protocol) shows the protocol in use (the major types of protocols are: http://, ftp://, mailto://, telnet://, etc.), the second part specifies the host name or IP address and the third part shows the location of the document (path to file). The protocol is separated from the host name or IP address by "://". In their turn directories are separated from the host (domain) name by “/”.

V

Vector-graphics is also called object-oriented graphics that represent the digital images as points, lines and other geometric entities. These programs store images in the form of mathematical representations that can be resized without any corruption. Vector graphics use computer algorithms to describe shapes, lines, animation, etc. Vector graphics and raster graphics are the two fundamental structures for digital images.

VPS– Virtual Private Server – (also referred to as OS virtualization) is a method of splitting a single computer (server) into multiple servers, called "virtual environments". Each environment contains its own copy of OS and can be independently rebooted.

W

Webmail– is a web-based interface used to check incoming/outgoing mails. You can either send/receive emails directly though webmail interface (in such case emails are downloaded to the mailserver and you need to be connected to the Internet to check them) or you can setup a mail client(such as Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.). If you use webmail interface you can access your email anytime through any computer connected to the Internet. If you use mail client your emails will be downloaded to the local computer and you’ll be able to check them (read, re-read, etc.) only from that PC. The most popular webmail applications are horde, squirrel, Roundcube, allohomail, openxchange, ms exchange and the ones written for public mailsystems like gmail, yahoo!, hotmail, etc.

Webmaster (also called web developer, site administrator) – is a person in charge of maintaining, designing and updating a website.

Webpage is a source of information that can be accessed through the browser.

Web server– is a software application that is responsible for returning webpages per clients’ requests. The two most popular Web servers are Apache and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

WHOIS is a network protocol and client/server system used to obtain the information about the domain name owner. This information usually contains contact information of the domain name registrant, administrative, technical and billing contacts as well as domain name registrar, status, nameservers information, creation and expiration dates, etc.

Windows hosting– is a type of webhosting when all hosted sites are run on Windows server 2003 and higher and IIS is installed as a web server. Windows hosting is a good solution for those who develop their web sites in Windows FrontPage or the .NET environment, or with the help of any other Windows based tools. If you choose Windows as a hosting platform be ready that it is more expensive than Unix-based one on account of licensing costs associated with Windows.

WYSIWYG(abbr. What You See Is What You Get) is the way of editing when the content displayed during editing is exactly the same as the final result.