Web Hosting Glossary

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Payment Gateway
This is an application service provider which is comparable to a point of sale system, only virtual. These involve the encryption of sensitive information like credit card information, the authorization of payments, and the handling of transactions between the issuing and acquiring banks involved. A payment gateway is essential to processing credit card payments through an online store.

PHP (Hypertext PreProcessor)
PHP is a server-side scripting language. Like ASP and Cold Fusion, its instructions are interpreted by the web server, which renders the output as HTML which is then sent to the visitor’s browser for rendering. PHP allows for dynamic sites capable of communicating with databases, and extended capabilities not possible with HTML alone.

PHP Hosting
Web hosting capable of parsing PHP code. Virtually all hosting these days provides this capability.

POP (Post Office Protocol)
This is the standard protocol used by mail clients to connect to and retrieve mail from mail servers. The current version is 3, and is sometimes referred to as POP3.

PostgreSQL
This is a very powerful, but still rather obscure, database system which is free, and which is considered a free alternative to larger relational database systems like Oracle.