Glossary of Internet Service Related Terms

Under Construction

A term used to describe a Web page or Website that is still being developed.

Unique Visitor

Website traffic measurement where each person's individual IP address visiting a particular website is counted only once, regardless of how many times they visit that particular website in a given day.

UNIX

UNIX is the trademarked name of the multiuser, multitasking, time-sharing operating system developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969. Many websites are maintained on UNIX systems. While technically the name UNIX refers to only a few trademark-licensed versions, it is often used to refer to the many versions currently available on the market. The differences to the user are slight.

Upgrade

An upgrade is a later release of a software program. Most software companies work to improve their existing software by upgrading it periodically by adding new features and functions.

Upload

The opposite of download, to upload means to transfer files or other data from the computer in use to another computer (or server).

Uploading

Often confused with downloading, uploading a file means loading it from your computer onto a remote one. Most people do a lot more downloading than uploading.

Uptime Guarantee

Refers to the amount of time within a specific period that a hosting provider's system is active or available for servicing site visitors. All hosts must have some downtime for routine maintenance or unexpected outages. The most reliable hosts will guarantee 99.9% uptime. Practically speaking anything less than that means a host is not competent or has insufficient reources. What does Uptime Guarantee really mean? 99.5% uptime guarantee = 216 minutes of downtime in a month 99.8% uptime guarantee = 86.4 minutes of downtime 99.9% uptime guarantee = 43.2 minutes of downtime 99.99% uptime guarantee = 4.32 minutes of downtime 99.999% uptime guarantee = 0.432 minutes (26 seconds).

URL

An acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is the address for a resource or site (usually a directory or file) on the World Wide Web and the convention that web browsers use for locating files and other remote services.

URL Submission

A request to a search engine using online forms that a URL be indexed.

USB - Universal Serial Bus

USB is short for Universal Serial Bus. USB ports are designed to replace parallel and serial ports and are seen on all new computers. USB ports are true to their name and are the universal ports now used to connect printers, scanners, digital cameras, digital camcorders, external drives, and more to desktop computers using the same port (hole/outlet in the back of computer).

Usenet

Usenet refers to the collection of newsgroups (sometimes called the Big Eight hierarchies) and a set of agreed-upon rules for distributing and maintaining them. More than 13,000 newsgroups exist around the world and the majority of them are a part of Usenet. However, a fairly large number of alternative newsgroups have emerged outside of Usenet.

Usenet newsgroups

More than 17,000 topic-oriented message bases that can be read and posted to. Also called newsgroups.

User Name

Your user name, also called user ID or account name, is the same as your login name. This is the name by which you and your electronic mailbox are identified online

UUCP

An acronym for UNIX to UNIX Copy Program, UUCP is a protocol for transferring files, news, and mail, and executing remote commands between machines.

Uuencode

A means of translating binary data so that it can be sent as an ASCII file across the Internet. (You need a decoder to convert it back into its native format at the other end.

UUencode/UUdecode

UUencode/UUdecode is a software utility that converts a binary file (often a photo or a graphic) to an ASCII (text) file so that it can be sent as an attachment to an e-mail message or downloaded from a newsgroup. Since e-mail messages must be text, not binary information, UUencode disguises non-text files as text so that they can be included in a mail message. When the message is received, the recipient, or their e-mail program, runs UUdecode to convert it to the original file.