ServeU.net Web Hosting

What do the words mean? We have put together a glossary of the terms usually used in relation to web hosting.

Money-Back-Guarantee
We offer a 30 day money-back-guarantee for all our web hosting clients, which means that in this period you can have your money refunded. Anything after these 30 days is non-refundable (Domain names are non-refundable once registered).

Disk Space
Disk space is the amount of storage you get when signing up for a web hosting account. It can be used for uploading any type of files - everything from text documents, to .html documents, to pictures.

Traffic
Traffic is the term used to describe the amount of data transferred from your hosting account per month and is determined by the number of visits to your web site and the size of data that each visitor downloads. Your e-mail traffic is also taken into count.
The 300 GB traffic that is allowed on our Business account is a huge amount of traffic for most web sites.

Domain name registration
Domain registration is the process of registering a unique name which will identify your web site. Domain names must have an extension, where .com .net and .org are the most popular ones. When registering a domain name, users should keep in mind that domains are tied to name servers, which direct to which IP address the domain should point. Any server can have multiple domain names, but a domain name can only point to one server.

Technical support
Technical support is somebody to call, e-mail or message when something with the service you're using has gone wrong, or you don't seem to know how to complete a given task and would like professional assistance.

Extensive online documentation
We have written and compiled one of the biggest online documentaries available on the Internet today. We have various FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) and tutorials available to all our users.

Integrated ticketing system
We have developed and integrated an online ticketing system for all its users. Should you ever experience any technical difficulties, feel free to post an online trouble ticket at www.propersupport.com. Our experienced team of technicians will solve your problem in an average of 15 minutes.

1 hour response guarantee
We guarantee that all your requests, wether sales or support related, will be answered in a time span of no more than 60 minutes.

Hosted domains
ServeU.net is proud to announce that we can host virtually any top level domain. No matter if you're extension is .co.uk, .us, or even .fj! We can host up to 3 domain names on a single accounts (Corporate web hosting plan only).

Subdomain
Subdomain is subsection of a domain. One such example of subdomain would be john.yourdomain.com.

Custom MX and A records
MX Record (Mail Exchange Record)- Mail Server records designate the mailservers that will handle mail for a given domain. Should a user have more than one mailserver, MX records can also specify the order in which the mailservers will be used as primary, secondary, backup and so on. An A record is a DNS Address resource record. It maps a host's name to its address and specifies the Internet Protocol address (in dotted decimal form) of the host. Each host address should have one A record.

Site Studio
Our free advanced online web site builder will help you create and modify your brand new web page with ease! Site Studio has been optimized to guarantee your easy and pleasant work with web pages. Now you can have a web site up and running in 30 minutes! Read more and see Demo here

FrontPage Extensions support
FrontPage® is a Microsoft® product. It's software built for web publishing and it's main priority is that it allows HTML programmers a visual perspective when creating web documents. FrontPage's capabilities are fairly decent for building, for example, the essential HTML tables. It also allows users to FTP documents to a web server, giving them the ability to view their web pages online. A server with FrontPage® compatibility will allow it's users to edit their site using Microsoft® FrontPage®. This also allows them to make use of a special built-in features that use FrontPage Extensions (FrontPage Extensions Server add-ons which allows users to make use of pre-defined functions such as hit counters, Java buttons and form validation).
For more information about Microsoft® Office FrontPage® please visit http://www.microsoft.com/FrontPage/.

POP3 e-mail accounts
POP (Post Office Protocol) refers to the protocol commonly used by e-mail software (for example Outlook Express) to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP3 is currently the most common e-mail standard.

E-mail aliases
E-mail aliases can be setup as additional e-mail accounts, all under one domain name. If, for example, your primary e-mail is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and you'd like to add a secondary mail to your mailing account you can use an e-mail alias to set up your second e-mail address as This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Mailing lists
A mailing list is a system which allows people to send an e-mail to one address, where their message and/or attachments are copied and then resent to all of the other subscribers in that particular mailing list

SPAM filter
Using a SPAM filter, you can sort out unwanted e-mail messages. We use SPAM Assassin software to filter unwanted e-mails. Usually the SPAM Assassin software with the default settings that we offer will successfully filter 85-95% of all unwanted e-mail messages. If you devote sufficient amounts of time and attention to the additional settings of the SPAM filter, you can considerably increase this percentage to 95-99% combining it with the additional manual settings of the e-mail filter!

E-mail filter
The e-mail filter is a different service from the SPAM filter. The SPAM filter has two levels of protection (low and high), while e-mail filter has specific conditions and requirements, which should be set up manually for additional filtration according to the specified conditions for receiving and sorting of your incoming e-mail messages.

Web e-mail
All our clients receive access to the our web mail. It's a free web-based e-mail system for easy and quick access to your mailbox. It can be used from anywhere and at any time, no e-mail client is required.

POP3
A mail server that supports the POP3 protocol. Used for retrieval and sending of e-mail messages using the POP3 protocol.

SMTP
An SMTP server is a mail server that supports the SMTP protocol for e-mail transfer.

E-mail forwarding
E-mail forwarding is a concept very similar to e-mail aliases. Using this service, you can also forward e-mail messages to Yahoo e-mail accounts, AOL e-mail accounts, Hotmail e-mail accounts, etc. wherever you wish. In other words, an e-mail message to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it can be forwarded to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it for example, as well as to any other e-mail address that you specify for this service.

Autoresponder e-mails
An e-mail autoresponder is a special function that automatically returns a pre written templated message to anyone who sends e-mail to a particular e-mail address. E-mail autoresponders are widely used for the purpose of responding to visitor comments and suggestions in a pre-made, templated answer.

Catch-all e-mails
Catch-all e-mail is used to directs e-mail sent to any user (existing or not) on your e-mail list. This means that should an e-mail ever be sent to any address with @yourdomain.com at the end, the mail will be received and sorted in a special mailbox of your choice.

Anti-Virus protection
Software installed on a machine to prevent the introduction of viruses. Will also detect their presence and repair or remove them. Virus is a software that is covertly introduced on to a computer system with the intent of corrupting data or inhibiting the normal operation of the system or network.

MySQL
MySQL is a multi-user SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL is quite a common database, proving APIs (application program interface) for such languages as C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and Python. Information in the database is stored and retrieved using SQL. MySQL is only available on Linux/Unix based web hosts.

phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended specifically to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet. It can create and drop databases, it can edit tables (create, drop, modify) and fields, execute an SQL statement, manage privileges and also export data into various formats.

Perl
Perl (short for Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a general-purpose programming language invented by Larry Wall in 1987. With way over one million users around the globe, it's not hard to see why it has become the language of choice for Web development, text processing, Internet services and even mail filtering, graphical programming, systems administration, and every other common task requiring portable and easily-developed solutions.

PHP
PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side HTML embedded scripting language, used to create dynamic Web pages. A dynamic Web page is a page that can interact with the user viewing it, so that each page visitor sees specially customized information. PHP is open source and freely available for (primarily) use on Linux (UNIX) Web servers. It is also a great alternative to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology used on Windows-based web hosts. The PHP script is embedded within a Web page along with its HTML, just like ASP is. Before the page resolves, the Web server calls PHP to interpret and perform the operations called for in the PHP script. Any HTML page scripted in PHP is typically given a file name suffix of ".php," ".php4," or ".phtml.".

Over 3500 Perl modules
A Perl module is a reusable package defined in a library file whose name is the same as the name of the package (with a .pm on the end)

Crontab
Crontab is a Unix command for scheduling jobs which will be executed sometime in the future. A cron is usually used to schedule a task that is executed periodically - for example, to send out an e-mail message to specified people every month. Being a daemon process, it runs continuously, waiting for specific events to occur.

Advanced Control Panel
Our advanced Control Panel is a great way to manage your hosting account. It's packed with features and will help you relieve your web hosting efforts.

FTP
To publish your website on Internet you need to upload the files of your website to a web hosting server. That is when you use FTP (File Transfer Protocol). There are several ways to use FTP, but the most common way is to use a FTP-client (FTP-software). There are several free FTP-clients that you can download from the Internet. Once you have installed the software on your local computer, just create a new FTP connection with the FTP-account details that you find in our web hosting control panel (FTP host, FTP username, and FTP password). Click here for an example of a FTP-software that will do the job.

File manager
Our web-based file manager is a browsing, uploading and downloading tool, specifically designed for the needs of new users. Using the web-based file manager, they can execute specific file-related commands with ease.

Custom Error 404 page
A HTML Error 404 means a request was made for a file (or an object) and it was not found on the queried server. The most common reasons for such an error are : Moved pages, renamed pages, general user or server mistyping, and also the fact that some operating systems are case sensitive.

Password Protected Directories
Password protected directories allow you to protect information on your web site by specifying a single user or multi-user password protected directory. Password protected directories will allow you to store information online that will not be accessible to the general site visitor. This feature is a great tool in giving specific people a place to log into on your site and view documentation that is for them only.

Instant account activation
Your account will be active immediately after you've filled out our signup form. Users can access it instantly and begin work on their web store straight away.

SSL Certificate generation
Secure Sockets Layer. Allows encrypted, authenticated communications over the Web. SSL provides security in online commerce. URL's starting with "https://" indicate the utilization of SSL.
SSL certificate generation is the process of generation an unsigned SSL certificate code, before sending it to an authorized registrar for approval.

SSI
Server-Side Include (SSI) is a command in the form of an HTML comment that communicates with the web server and performs a task as part of the page download. Different servers support different commands and there is no official standard yet. If the web page you're visiting has a .shtml extension it's likely the page was generated partially with SSI commands.

SSH
SSH means Secure Shell and it allows you to securely access your web site using the SSH encryption software. Very useful for advanced web developers.

Unrestricted bandwidth
Unrestricted bandwidth means that you can use the maximum of our bandwidth connection available speed at a given moment. We haven't set a bandwidth cap and the data transfer, it's fully unrestricted.

Raw access and error logs
Error log - An error log records any abnormal activity on a web site or web server. It's common for different sites or servers to generate custom error logs, reflecting the use and abuse of the system. Systems administrators have to rely on such logs and are responsible for retrieving and examining them for any errors. Access logs are simply log every visit to your site and all the hits inside the site itself.

Traffic stats - WebAlizer
Our traffic stats utility compiles several reports with graphics and text for each processed month. The Webalizer produces several reports (html) and graphics for each month processed. In addition, a summary page is generated for the current and previous months (up to 12). The yearly (index) report shows statistics for a 12-month period, and links to each month. The monthly report has detailed statistics for that month with additional links to any URL's and referrers found.

Detailed bandwidth stats
All our users can have access to a detailed summary of their bandwidth stats.

Linux with Apache
Linux is currently the most popular, freely-distributable open source operating system, which can runs on a number of hardware platforms. The Linux kernel was originally developed by Linus Torvalds. Since it is free of charge, and because it has such a high platform compatibility (this includes PCs and Macintoshes), Linux has become an extremely popular alternative to payed operating platforms. Apache is a freely distributed Web server that is available under an "open source" license. According to a popular web server survey 60% of web sites on the World Wide Web are using Apache, easily making Apache more widely used than all other Web servers combined. By means of comparison, hosting a website on Unix or Linux is nearly identical.

Linux or Windows web hosting?
What is Linux or Windows web hosting about? Well, it has nothing to do with what Operating System you prefer on your own computer. Fact is that most websites on the Internet are hosted on Linux web servers, and still most webmasters use Windows on the computer where they create the website. We use Linux for our web servers because it is more stable and handles big loads better than Windows web servers. Since Linux is free software, it also allows us to offer quality web hosting for a lower price than if we would use Windows OS on our web servers. For the creating of dynamic web sites on a Linux server, you would usually use PHP programming language and a MySQL database. Please be aware of that you cannot run a Windows database or ASP on our Linux servers, so if you for some reason have such needs, you’d better look for Windows web hosting. Again, please note that the choice of web hosting OS has no significance for your website’s visitors.

2.5 GBits network connectivity
The internet connection speed is currently one of the fastest available - 2.5 Gbits. This is the total connectivity that our network provider located in Fremont/California has with the outside world.

Daily data back-up
We treat our clients information with the utmost care. That's the reason why we backup all the info on our servers on a daily basis. Should there be any technical issue, we can restore all the info from the previous day.

UPS & diesel back-up generator
We have a powerful UPS's and diesel backup electricity generator, should we ever experience a prolonged power outage.

Find more answers in our searchable Web Hosting FAQ.