Glossary

Last change on 2021-06-23 • Created on 2020-03-25 • ID: RO-860C7

Introduction

This article provides explanations of common terms about your server.

Data traffic

Data traffic (or just traffic) refers to the flow of information within computer networks.

Traffic measurements are based on the amount of data transferred. If I transfer e.g. a 1 megabyte (large) file from one PC to another, this results in traffic of (approximately) 1 MB.

Usually hosting providers use this term when they set prices for their products or services. Most providers have a free quota (or free traffic), and the client only pays for additional traffic. The real costs vary greatly depending on the amount of data there is and the guaranteed bandwidth. The costs are usually a mere 5 cents per gigabyte. The customer usually pays around 20 cents to several euros per gigabyte.

Dedicated Server

A Dedicated Server is a server (for example, a web server or mail server) that just one customer uses. With Shared Hosting, more than one customer uses the server; they share the server and the resources on it.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. Customers often use it to upload web pages and other documents from a private development machine to a public web hosting server. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol

HTML

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

Internal traffic

Data traffic between and within the data centers. Hetzner does not calculate the internal traffic. (It is free).

KVM Console

A device that supports the remote control of a server down to the BIOS level. See: KVM Console

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic Web pages. It is among one of the first developed server-side scripting languages to be embedded into an HTML source document, rather than calling an external file to process data. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

Data center

With "data center", we mean both of two things: 1) the location/building where one or more companies/organizations house their computers 2) the company or organization that takes care of these computers. The common abbreviation is DC.

Hetzner operates the following data centers: Data Centers

You can find more information here: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/

rsync

A tool for comparing files on different servers.

SCP

A tool to transfering data over an encrypted connection.

Software RAID

Software RAID is when the interaction of multiple drives is organized completely by software. See: Software RAID

Shell

An operating system's text-based control window.

Storage capacity

Storage capacity is the total available space of a data structure or a storage medium.

Megabyte (2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes, about 10^6 bytes)

  • 5 MB - The Bible as a text
  • 650 to 700 megabytes - A CD-ROM

Gigabyte (2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes, about 10^9 bytes)

  • 5 GB - A compressed movie

Terabyte (2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, about 10^12 bytes)

  • 20 TB - The text size of the collection of the Library of Congress with about 20 million books in 1963. (It should now be up to 80 TB).

Petabyte (2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, about 10^15 bytes)

  • The storage capacity of the world's largest data centers in late 2002 was between 1 and 10 petabytes.

Hetzner always discloses traffic based on powers of 2, so for example 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes.

SSH

A shell over an encrypted connection.

URL

In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator (URL) is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource. A URL is technically a type of uniform resource identifier (URI) but in many technical documents and verbal discussions, URL is often used as a synonym for URI. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator

UPS

An uninterruptible power supply (also uninterruptible power source) ensures that even when the power grid goes down, there is still a power supply. Fluctuations in the power grid of the utility companies are now also part of the picture, so the UPS will also adjust for variations (peaks, etc.). UPSs are used among other places in hospitals, television and radio stations, data centers and operations centers.

All Hetzner data centers use UPSs (as well as having backup diesel generators).

Table of Contents