Uptime is literally what it means - it is the amount of time your site is online throughout the entire month.

The best uptime would be 100%, but because things can break, many hosts offer 99.9% uptime guarantees. This means that if your site is not accessible for more than 43 minutes in a single month, they will reimburse you, depending on their terms of service.

Uploading your site can be done in many ways, but the most popular is FTP.

When your hosting account was created, you should have been provided with an FTP account. Using software such as CuteFTP or WS_FTP, you can log into your host. Then, using the program like a normal windows program, you can drag and drop files onto your web host. These files become live online instantaneously.

There are other ways to upload your site such as using SSH or uploading files through your browser or your site's control panel.

Consider subdomains as an extension of your domain. For example, your site is www.example.com. A subdomain would be test.example.com, and another would be webhosting.example.com.

Subdomains are usually treated as separate sites from the main domain site.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.