Glossary of Terms

E-commerce
Electronic Commerce - Quite simply, it means conducting business online. In the traditional sense of selling goods, it is possible to do this electronically because of certain software programs that run the main functions of an e-commerce Web site, such as product display, online ordering, and inventory management. The software, which works in conjunction with online payment systems to process payments, resides on a commerce server. The definition of e-commerce has expanded to include all kinds of commercial online transactions, like selling products via credit cards, charging for advertising on a high-traffic Web site, or trading stock in your brokerage account -- practically any way a company can derive revenue online is thought of as e-commerce.

E-mail
Email is the sending and receiving of messages, usually text, from one computer to another using email software.

E-mail alias
An alias is an alternate email address that forwards messages to another location. For example, you can set up an alias to forward mail sent to sales@example.com and info@example.com to your user@example.com mailbox. The benefit of an alias is that it saves you from having to set up and check extra mailboxes. However, if you reply to mail sent to the sales and info aliases, the outgoing mail will still come from the user@example.com address. An alias does not have its own storage space, username, and password, so it must be associated with another email address. To learn how to set up an email alias for your specific Interland email service, please refer to our knowledgebase at http://answers.interland.com.

Encryption
A way of making data unreadable to everyone except the receiver, encryption is an increasingly common way of sending credit card numbers over the Internet when conducting commercial transactions.

Ethernet
A widespread networking scheme rated at 10 Mbs (megabits per second).

Extensions
The characters after the dot in a file's name are considered its extension. This is used to determine how the file is formatted and viewed. For example a file named netlingo.html means that the file is coded in HTML and therefore must be viewed with a compatible program such as a Web browser in order to see it properly. On the Internet you will come across many different file extensions such as .dcr, .mov, .avi and .au. In order to properly handle these files your browser must be configured to recognize these extensions.