The Internet can be a complicated place with jargon and abbreviations seemingly designed to baffle anyone who isn't an Internet expert. Our jargon buster is here to help you understand some of the language that we've had to use to explain our services.

phpBB2
This is a popular Internet Forum, written in the PHP programming language.

Website Builder
Our website builder is designed to help you build your own website, with simple tools so you can design your website the way that you want and amend it when it suits you.

Blog
Short for 'Web Log' and is a website or part of a website where a particular person or business can post news, views or a commentary on a particular topic or topics. The entries are then displayed in reverse chronological order for others to read and sometimes comment on.

Shopping Cart
This is a piece of software used to assist customers in making purchases from a website. This software allows people to 'place' items in their shopping cart or basket, before proceeding to the 'checkout' where their order is calculated and payment is securely taken.

Template
This is a pre-designed web page, whereby you can add your own text and pictures to the web page and in this way customise it. However the design and layout has already been completed, this is helpful for assembling a professional looking website quickly and easily.

Control Panel
When you sign-up for a hosting account you will gain access to your own control panel, where you can gain technical support, access your web builder, personalise your email, get access to free software and templates, view your sites statistics and gain access to over fifty different functions.

WordPress
WordPress is a blog publishing system, which is widely used and trusted all over the world. With a few clicks you can integrate WordPress into your website and begin writing your own blog within minutes.

.bvp
A .bvp file is an abbreviation of BlueVoda Publication file. This is a proprietary format which represents an encoded web page. On Free Virtual Servers you can easily transfer your previous .bvp files from our previous web builder to our new web builder.

FTP
An abbreviation of File Transfer Protocol. This is the method that makes it possible to transfer or share files across the Internet from one computer system to another.

Stream/Streaming
Technology that enables the playback of sounds or video without the need to download the entire resource file in advance.

Domain Name
Domain names make it easy for people to remember the address of your web site. Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD) name, which is either one of a small list of generic names (three or more characters) like .com .net .org .info, or a two characters territory like .uk .at .eu.

Example domain names are: example.com or example.co.uk

Nameservers
A Name Server is a network server that provides a naming, or directory service.

IP
A standard that allows for the transmission of data across networks. Every machine that is on the internet has a unique IP number. To find out your IP address just visit a site like www.myipaddress.com.

Domain Name:
A domain name is what you type into the address bar to visit a website, like www.example.com or www.example.co.uk. You can pick a domain name that suits you, as long as someone else hasn't already taken it. Use our Domain Finder to see what's available. All websites need a domain name, so choose one that reflects your website and is memorable.

MySQL:
This is a database management system, which is used behind the scenes on many websites, giving Internet users a way to access the information in the database. It is fast, reliable and widely used for these reasons. Common uses of MySQL could be for online shopping carts or blog software.

Bandwidth:
The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The higher your bandwidth limit, the more visitors you can have.

POP3:
An abbreviation for Post Office Protocol, which is a format for delivery of emails across the Internet.

Webspace:
This is the amount of storage space that you get on our server for your website and emails. To give you a guide 500MB is equivalent to more than 300 floppy disks.

Subdomains:
A sub-domain is when you put something in front of your domain name. For example www.example.com can have a sub-domain like www.test.example.com or www.example.com/test.

Google Page Rank:
Google (TM) PageRank(TM) is a numeric representation of the "importance" that Google attributes to a webpage. This is derived from numerous factors including the number of links going to the webpage and the quality of the pages which link in.