100 Best Web Hosts Terms

Label
A label is part of a programming language that identifies a specific location within a program. Often the label will identify a certain line of source code through a sequence of characters. A label is often used as the destination GOTO statement, allowing the user to "go to" or jump from one section of source code to another.

Lame delegation
Same as Lame Server.

Lame Server
A Lame Server is when a server is listed in your nameserver records but is not listed with your registrar and thus has no authoritative data for your domain name server.

LAN - Local Area Network
A LAN is a Local Area Network that links more than one device together within a relatively small area (no more than a few miles). Often a school or airport will have all of their computers linked through one network, creating their own LAN. A LAN is convenient for sharing information between devices within that network. Many offices use a LAN to connect all their hardware.

LAN modem
A LAN (Local Area Network) Modem is a modem that can provide multiple computers with the same internet connection but each will having varying speeds. Having a LAN modem provides each computer with a unique IP address.

Leased line
A dedicated communication line. User is charged a flat fee instead of being billed per minute of usage.

Line provisioning
It is the process of configuring the ISDN line by the service provider to suit user's particular needs and to assure hardware compatibility. It's due to the fact that ISDN is not completely standardized.

Link
Another name for a connection. Sometimes refers to a physical line.

Linux
A free UNIX-like operating system developed by Linus Torvalds. Linux and FreeBSD are very often used by hosting companies as their operating systems.

Live chat
This has become popular over the past couple years as a support and sales tool where the user can instant message from right in the web browser. These programs are web based and most commonly in php.

Load Balancing
Distributing data across a network of servers in order to ensure that a single Web server does not get overloaded with work, thereby affecting performance or even causing the server to crash.

LOC Record
Location Record. Experimental, proposed in 1996. Informational, not functional. Used to give latitude and longitude, in degrees minutes and seconds, altitude in meters, and dimensions (in terms of meters) of a host.

Log file
A file maintained on a server in which details of all file accesses are stored. Analysing log files can be a powerful way to find out about a web site's visitors, where they come from and which queries are used to access a site. Best viewed with a program such as Webalizer.

Login
An alias for an individual that is used for identification and authentication when accessing a computer system. Usually it is a sequence of characters and digits.

Lossless
A compression scheme is loseless when decompressed file is exactly the same as the original. This is needed for compressing executable programs and data files.

Lossy
A lossy compression allows for the quality of the compressed data to be diminished after decompression. It is suitable for audio, video and image compression.

LZW compression
Lempel Ziv Welch compression - a popular compression algorithm.