Web Hosting Glossary

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CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
This enables the passage of data between a web server and a CGI program, commonly referred to as a script. This expands the capabilities of a website significantly, permitting HTML pages other applications to interact, and perform functions that HTML is incapable of on its own.

Chat
This generally refers to a service on the internet wherein people may communicate in real-time, in virtual chat rooms, using nicknames to identify themselves. These have waned in popularity over the years, but are still commonly used throughout the internet.

CMS (Content Management System)
This is a kind of web application which allows for high-functionality sites with minimal effort needed to set them up. These are also known as “portals” and are database-driven applications usually developed in PHP or ASP. Popular examples of these are Joomla, Drupal, e107, PHPNuke, and Movable Type.

Cold Fusion Hosting
Web hosting that supports the parsing of Cold Fusion code, a server side scripting language originally developed by Allaire, and currently owned by Adobe through their acquisition of Macromedia.

Colocated Hosting
Colocation is the practice of leasing space at a facility which provides connectivity and security, for the placement of ones own equipment, such as a web server or mail server. This is similar to dedicated hosting, except that instead of leasing the server as well as space in the facility, you provide the equipment to be housed at the facility.

Cookie
This is a tool used to store important information about a client for subsequent reference by a web server. An example of this might be a weather site. If you go to the site, and provide your zip code so as to see the weather in your area, the web server might place a cookie in your browser with this information stored in it, and when you visit the weather site again, the server will attempt to access the cookie, and if it is able, will bypass your having to provide your zip code, and take you straight to the weather for your area.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Cascading style sheets are essentially repositories of directives which, in the absence of explicitly coded html variables, apply the qualities specified in the CSS file to all tags used in the linked-from HTML document. For example, if you have a CSS file that specifies that all H1 tags adopt a particular font, color, size, etc., any use of the H1 tag will adopt these settings from the CSS file, keeping everything clean and centralized. This makes site-wide changes to, say, text color, very simple to implement.