In the rapidly evolving world of technology, new terms, abbreviations, and acronyms are continually emerging, especially in the domains of websites, internet service providers (ISPs), and related technologies. This whitepaper aims to provide an easily accessible guide to the top 100 most commonly used terms and acronyms in these fields.
1. WWW (World Wide Web): The web of hyperlinked documents and media accessible via the internet.
2. HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): The protocol used for transferring hypermedia documents on the web.
3. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure): A secure version of HTTP, which includes data encryption for security.
4. HTML (HyperText Markup Language): The standard markup language for documents to be displayed in a web browser.
5. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): A style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in HTML.
6. JS (JavaScript): A high-level, interpreted programming language used to make web pages interactive.
7. ISP (Internet Service Provider): A company that provides internet access to customers.
8. IP (Internet Protocol): The method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another on the internet.
9. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): The suite of communication protocols used to connect hosts on the internet.
10. URL (Uniform Resource Locator): A reference (address) to a resource on the internet.
11. DNS (Domain Name System): The system that translates internet domain names into IP addresses.
12. CDN (Content Delivery Network): A system of distributed servers that deliver pages and other web content to a user based on their geographic location.
13. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
14. SEM (Search Engine Marketing): A type of internet marketing that promotes websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages, primarily through paid advertising.
15. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer): A standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser.
16. TLS (Transport Layer Security): An updated, more secure version of SSL.
17. VPN (Virtual Private Network): A secure connection method used to add security and privacy to private and public networks.
18. UI (User Interface): The space where interactions between humans and machines occur.
19. UX (User Experience): A person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system, or service.
20. API (Application Programming Interface): A set of protocols and tools for building software and applications.
21. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML): A group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications.
22. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor): A widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.
23. SQL (Structured Query Language): A standard language for managing and manipulating databases.
24. ASP.NET: (Active Server Pages .NET): A web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, applications, and services.
25. SaaS (Software as a Service): A software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.
26. CMS (Content Management System): A software application that is used to create and manage digital content.
27. CRMs (Customer Relationship Management): A technology for managing a company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.
28. ROI (Return on Investment): A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of different investments.
29. TLD (Top-Level Domain): The last segment of a domain name, or the part that follows immediately after the “dot” symbol. Examples include .com, .org, .net, etc.
30. UGC (User Generated Content): Any form of content, such as images, videos, text, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms.
31. SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a searcher.
32. B2B (Business to Business): A type of commerce transaction that exists between businesses, such as a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer.
33. B2C (Business to Consumer): Business or transactions conducted directly between a company and consumers who are the end-users of its products or services.
34. CTR (Click Through Rate): The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement.
35. PPC (Pay Per Click): An internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
36. CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions): A term used in traditional advertising media selection, as well as online advertising and marketing related to web traffic.
37. RSS (Really Simple Syndication): A type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format.
38. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics): An XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation.
39. PNG (Portable Network Graphics): A raster-graphics file-format that supports lossless data compression.
40. JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): A commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography.
41. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): A bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987.
42. XML (eXtensible Markup Language): A markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
43. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): A lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate.
44. FTP (File Transfer Protocol): A standard network protocol used for the transfer of computer files between a client and server on a computer network.
45. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): An Internet standard for electronic mail (email) transmission.
46. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): An Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection.
47. POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3): A mail access protocol used by a client to fetch emails from a mail server.
48. LAN (Local Area Network): A network that connects computers and other devices in a relatively small area, typically a single building or a group of buildings.
49. WAN (Wide Area Network): A telecommunications network that extends over a large geographical area for the primary purpose of computer networking.
50. QoS (Quality of Service): The overall performance of a telephony or computer network, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network.
51. DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol): A network management protocol used on IP networks whereby a DHCP server dynamically assigns an IP address and other network configuration parameters to each device on the network, so they can communicate with other IP networks.
52. NAT (Network Address Translation): A method of remapping one IP address space into another by modifying network address information in the IP header of packets while they are in transit across a traffic routing device.
53. MAC (Media Access Control): A sublayer of the data link layer in the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking.
54. VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol): A technology for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks, such as the internet.
55. IoT (Internet of Things): The network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with sensors, software, and network connectivity—that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.
56. IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things): A subset of the larger IoT, which focuses on the specialized use of connected devices in industry and business.
57. ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line): A type of digital subscriber line technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines rather than a conventional voiceband modem can provide.
58. VDSL (Very high bitrate Digital Subscriber Line): A digital subscriber line (DSL) technology providing data transmission faster than ADSL.
59. Wi-Fi: (Wireless Fidelity): A family of wireless networking protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and internet access.
60. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access): A family of technologies created to protect information moving across Wi-Fi networks and includes solutions for personal and enterprise networks.
61. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy): A security algorithm for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Introduced as part of the original 802.11 standard ratified in 1997, its intention was to provide data confidentiality comparable to that of a traditional wired network.
62. P2P (Peer to Peer): A distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application.
63. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol): A standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet.
64. MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching): A routing technique in telecommunications networks that directs data from one node to the next based on short path labels rather than long network addresses, thus avoiding complex lookups in a routing table.
65. CDN (Content Delivery Network): A geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end-users.
66. DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service): A type of cyber attack where multiple compromised computers are used to attack a single system, causing a denial of service for users of the targeted system.
67. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart): A type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.
68. SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer Certificate): A type of digital certificate that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection.
69. UX Design (User Experience Design): The process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users.
70. PaaS (Platform as a Service): A category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app.
71. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): A form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet.
72. DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service): A cloud computing service model that allows an organization to back up its data and IT infrastructure in a third party cloud computing environment and provide all the capabilities of a traditional disaster recovery site.
73. HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language version 5): A markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and last major version of the HTML standard.
74. IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4): The fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks.
75. IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6): The most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet.
76. AI (Artificial Intelligence): The simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions.
77. ML (Machine Learning): A form of AI that enables a system to learn from data rather than through explicit programming.
78. AR (Augmented Reality): An interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information.
79. VR (Virtual Reality): A simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.
80. FTPS (File Transfer Protocol Secure): An extension to the commonly used File Transfer Protocol that adds support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocols.
81. SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol): A network protocol that provides file access, file transfer, and file management functionalities over any reliable data stream.
82. RWD (Responsive Web Design): An approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes.
83. TTFB (Time To First Byte): A measurement used as an indication of the responsiveness of a webserver or other network resource.
84. FTTB (Fiber To The Building): A type of high-speed Internet access where the Internet connection is delivered to the boundary of a building by running a fiber optic cable.
85. FTTX (Fiber to the x): A generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications.
86. JPEG2000 (Joint Photographic Experts Group 2000): An image compression standard and coding system. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee in 2000 with the intention of superseding their original discrete cosine transform-based JPEG standard with a newly designed, wavelet-based method.
87. DPI (Dots per Inch): A measure of spatial printing, video or image scanner dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm).
88. RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol): A proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft, which provides a user with a graphical interface to connect to another computer over a network connection.
89. SSH (Secure Shell): A cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network.
90. VNC (Virtual Network Computing): A graphical desktop sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol to remotely control another computer.
91. CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing): A mechanism that allows many resources (e.g., fonts, JavaScript, etc.) on a web page to be requested from another domain outside the domain from which the resource originated.
92. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): A messaging protocol that allows programs that run on disparate operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) to communicate with each other using hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and its Extensible Markup Language (XML).
93. REST (Representational State Transfer): An architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating web services.
94. GraphQL: (Graph Query Language): An open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for executing those queries with your existing data.
95. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML): A set of web development techniques using many web technologies on the client side to create asynchronous web applications.
96. OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project): An online community that produces freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.
97. XSS (Cross-Site Scripting): A type of security vulnerability typically found in web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users.
98. CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery): An attack that tricks the victim into submitting a malicious request. It uses the identity and privileges of the victim to perform an undesired function on their behalf.
99. SQLi (SQL Injection): A code injection technique that might destroy your database. It is one of the most common web hacking techniques.
100. MVC (Model-View-Controller): A software architectural pattern for implementing user interfaces on computers. It divides a given software application into three interconnected parts, so as to separate internal representations of information from the ways that information is presented to and accepted from the user.
By understanding and familiarizing oneself with these common terms and acronyms, individuals can navigate the world of websites, internet service providers (ISPs), and related technologies with greater ease and confidence. These terms reflect the key technologies, concepts, and strategies underpinning today’s digital ecosystem, making them crucial to effective participation in this landscape.