Glossary Definitions starting with Letter R

Terms that will help you understand hosting services. Internet reference and glossary of Web Hosting Terms and Definitions. Please select a letter to jump to that section of The Glossary.

A glossary is defined as an alphabetical list of technical terms in some specialized field of knowledge; usually published as an appendix to a text on that field. This Web Hosting Glossary section is specially designed to explain most of the terms that you should read and understand before you choose your web hosting service provider.

Raw access data updated in real-time that can be downloaded and used by any statistics program. Typically each line show the user's IP, date and time of the access, what kind of request was done, which document was requested, HTTP status code, bytes transferred, referrer, and user agent info. If a host doesn't have statistics, you'll need access to raw logs to identify who your site's visitors are. Analyzing raw logs can also provide more detailed look at site accesses than stats.
See also: (Log File)

Since every domain is unique, registries have been set up to assign domains to individuals and organizations. When a domain is registered with the appropriate registry, that domain is assigned and becomes no longer available for anyone else to use. Typically, there are registration and renewal fees (local registry fees) associated with the right to use a domain. However, there are some TLDs that are provided at no charge.

An organization responsible for assigning domain names for the TLD that they manage. Furthermore, it is their responsibility to update the global DNS tables that all nameservers use to resolve domain names. For example, InterNIC is the registry for .COM, .NET and .ORG domain names.

(Request For Comments) -- The name of the result and the process for creating a standard on the Internet . New standards are proposed and published on line, as a Request For Comments. The Internet Engineering Task Force is a consensus-building body that facilitates discussion, and eventually a new standard is established, but the reference number/name for the standard retains the acronym RFC, e.g. the official standard for e-mail is RFC 822.

A device that connects two Local Area Networks. Routers are similar to bridges, but provide additional functionality, such as the ability to filter messages and forward them to different places based on various criteria. The Internet uses routers extensively to forward packets from one host to another.
See also: (Modem)

A spider is a program run by a search engine to build a summary of a website's content (content index). It creates a text-based summary of content and an address (URL) for each webpage.

When a user searches, the keyword(s) they enter are compared with the available website content indexes. Due to the large number of web pages indexed, direct text-only-matching is rare, rather search engines use sophisticated logics (algorithms) to rank potential matches. For example, the underlying information hierarchy of a webpage (semantic markup) may be factored into the ranking a webpage is assigned.

A robots.txt is a permissions file that can be used to control which web pages of a website a search engine indexes. The file must be located in the root directory of the website for a search engine website-indexing program (spider) to reference, i.e. if the website address is:

The robots.txt file contains instructions ( directives ) that are read by spiders. Directives can be written to apply to all spiders or only target spiders from a specific search engine.
See also: (Spider)