Web hosting is the act of renting space and bandwidth through a company so that you may publish your web site online.

You can either opt for free hosting that is usually supported with banners and pop ups, or may opt to get paid web hosting, which gives you complete control over your site contents.

Also known as shared hosting, this form of web hosting should suffice for most everyone.

Virtual hosting simple refers to the fact that your site is on one server, and that this server hosts mulitple sites. You are virtually shared - your site will not be the only one on this specific server.

Very few sites would actually need the power of a dedicated server, so this option provides to be a reliable and cheap solution.

A domain name is a word along with a TLD that uniquely identifies your website.

Please visit our domains page for more information.

Diskspace is the size your website can be. Every single letter on your website has to be stored somewhere on your web host's server. Each letter is one byte, and a megabyte is roughly one million bytes. HTML pages are usually very small, but it is the extra images, scripts, and even databases that can take up large amounts of disk space.

Bandwidth/Transfer is the amount of data the server will allow your site to send in a month. Transfer is usually measured in gigabytes - billions of bytes. Once you go over your monthly limit, a host may either shut your site down for the remainder of the month or it can charge you 'overage.' This overcharge is usually about $2.00-$5.00 per extra gigabyte of transfer.

Flash is a client side feature - it runs on the user's computer, not on your web host. As long as the user's browser has the correct plugin installed, it will run on their computer.

These are all programming languages which are referred to by their acronyms.

PHP - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
ASP - Active Server Pages
Perl - not an acronym

Each programming language has its own benefits and uses. It is best that you research on your own to find one that best fits your needs.

Note! XOOPS is a PHP script.

MySQL and MS SQL are database systems. Depending on what your host provides, you can use a database to organize your data.

No. Provided that the domain is registered in your name (as it should be), you can simply update your namservers (from where you manage your domain names) to that of your new host.

Not at all. You are paying for webspace that is only yours - no one may put ads on your site except you.

Domain parking lets you buy a domain and then have a 'coming soon' page on it. This is not needed - if a domain is not parked it will simply be inaccessible to anyone.

Most domain registrars provide this by default.