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Internet or network terminology may sound obscure and confusing, but they usually have a parallel meaning to other terms we use in our everyday environment. Here is a list of common words used in Internet related discussions:

 Data: Information (text, images, mail, ...).

 Network: Similar to a city, town or neighborhood. Network can vary from 2 to thousands of computers. The roads inside cities or the roads connecting cities are called links or connections.

 Internet: The largest network of networks. If a network is a city or town, the Internet can be compared to Earth. Some places can be quickly accessed with lower costs, some places are more exotic or have very few ressources dedicated to infrastructures. This includes the usual political issues. Internet works in a similar way to airplanes. To go from one point to another, you may need to take many planes, faster planes are more expensive and that also includes all the usual political issues. Internet policy depends from country to country, and countries have independant negociations to connect to each other.

 Bandwith: Measurement of the amount of information (data) that can be transferred at a given time on a network link. Imagine a road (network link), the bandwith is the amount of cars per second that pass through a given point. [1]

 Protocol: Synonym of "language" or "habits". For computers to talk to each other, they must share a common protocol. The most famous protocols are IP (Internet Protocol), HTTP (hyper text transfer protocol, known as the Web) and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol, known as e-mail). Protocols can use other protocols, for example, web and e-mail are usually used over the Internet Protocol (IP). IP is used over wires, such as Ethernet, who also have their electrical language which are called protocols.

 Host: Computer connected to the network.

 Client and server: A server computer provides a service. For example a web server will serve web pages. Clients act as visitors or users of the services.

 IP address: Location of a host (server or client) on a network. When people ask "What is your IP?", they usually mean "What is your IP address?". IP addresses are similar to phone numbers and they also have phone books so that you don’t have to memorise them, which we will describe later (see DNS).

 The Web: The web refers to a spider web, e.g., many links are inter-connected to provide a reliable, yet flexible structure. This structure is the Internet, but what most people refer to when using the term "Web" is the World Wide Web (WWW), which is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP): a mix of pages with text and images where you can navigate with hyperlinks.

 Web site: Similar to a shop, café, public place or personnal home. They are located on web servers, which act as an infrastructure in the same way that blocks of flats are an infrastructure for appartments, shops and restaurants.

 Web hosting: Allocation of ressources on a web server. This is usually limited by the quantity of data (information) that can be stored on the web server (i.e. the size of the appartment or café). Some web hosting services also limit the quantity of data that can be sent or received to/from the Internet. This is because bandwith is usually expensive and limited (i.e. highways get saturated).

 Domain name: Symbolic name attached to an IP address. This makes surfing on the web much more practical. It is easier to remember "www.ngo-bg.org" than 212.72.219.194. Not only this, but the IP address is attached to the web server, not to a specific site, so once you have reached the site, you still need a name to request a specific site on the server. By comparison, phone numbers are hard to remember (especially when if you call hundreds of people per day), so we associate unique names in electronic phone books to quickly find the phone number of our correspondant. Once the person at the other end of the line picks up, we usually ask for a specific person since the phone may be shared between a group of people (family, office, etc.). Note that the habit of calling, waiting and asking for a specific person can be considered a protocol (habit, language).

 Top level domain names (TLD): The most important part of a domain name is the end: .com, .net, .org, .bg, .fr and so on. This indicates the purpose of the domain name, which can indicate if it is commercial (.com or .biz), a network or Internet Service Provider (.net), an organisation (.org), a cooperative (.coop), an information site (.info). Other important domain names are related to country codes (CC TLD), so for example a .fr domain usually represents a site aimed at French people. Country code domain names are usually easier or more reliable, but there are exceptions such as Bulgaria (.bg) where buying a domain name is probihitely expensive and mostly aimed at commercial companies. This is why there are so many "myname-bg.org" or "myname-bg.com" because .org and .com domaines are less expensive.

 Domain registrars: Provide a way to register a domain name. Domains ending in .org/.net/.com can be registered in most countries in your local currencies for the equivalent of about 12 € and impose few restrictions as long as the name is available. Country code domain names (.bg/.fr/.yu/...) are usually registered by regional organisations and may impose restrictions. There are registrars aimed at NGOs, such as Gandi. They use only Free Software and they are independant from larger media organisations.

 DNS : Domain Name Servers (DNS) are electronic phone books (or information agents) to associate domain names with IP addresses. Converting a domain name into an IP address is called "resolving a domain". DNS servers work in a hierarchical structure as a tree: there are 10-15 "root" domain name servers per TLD which act as the most important references. To avoid saturation of the root servers, work is deleguated regionaly: Every Internet Service Provider (ISP) has at least two DNS servers for their local users. The DNS of the ISP try to keep information on commonly requested domain names so that they do not need to constantly make requests to the root servers. In the same way, your registrar usually maintains two DNS servers with the information of your domain (if you have registered one). The root servers cannot keep track of the millions of domains in their TLD, they only know who to refer if they are asked about a particular domain.