web hosting

[expat1609]

hi guys,
hope somebody can help me out a bit.
i was asked to look for e-mail solution for a company.
as i see e-mail hosting is allmost same price as webhosting, i will go for the webhosting of coz.
now they have a few terms that need explaination to me:
POP3 and WebBased e-mail, what's the difference,advantage and disadvantege of each ????

what for need single or double domaine ???

what is an FTP account for, why having two FTP accounts, advantage of it ??

hope someone in here is a prof in this field and can help me out.

thx
expat

[Lexus]

FTP stands for Free Transfer Protocol.
It is used for other users to access certain folder on your computer to download thing. FTP cannot be hijacked, but the transfer rate is limited to 40kbps.

[kwchang]

Webmail is like what you get in Hotmail or GMail or YahooMail and even Fastmail in our very own forum. In this system, the adantage is that all the user need is a web-browser (like Firefox or IE) and the website address of the mail-server. The advantage of this is obvious - simple to use, no need to install mail software for the user and can be accessed from any PC - either from home, from office or from cybercafe. However, the disadvantage to this is the fixed storage of the user's mailbox. For example it is only 2MB in Hotmail, 250 MByte for Yahoomail or 2GByte for Gmail. You as the administrator or owner of the webmail service will need to PAY for the harddisk space. That can be very costly if you have many users and each user is allocated a large mailbox. Furthermore, the user cannot read their emails without being online on the internet.

POP3 involves a mail server just like webmail BUT users cannot access their mail directly from the server. They need to install their accounts from their own PC before they get mail. For example, Streamyx , Jaring and TMNet provides pop3 mail (althou they have a webmail option). The advantage of pop3 mail is the lower cost of running the server as you usually do not need large mailboxes. The clients of the mail service need to login to the mail server and in so doing, the emails stored in their respective mailboxes gets downloaded to the harddisk on their own PC. Once this is done, the users can even logoff the Internet and read their emails at leisure as the emails are now downloaded to their PCs. Since mail is constantly downloaded, the individual mailboxes on the server can be smaller than webmail as it gets emptied each time the users access their mailboxes. The disadvantage is that users need to install an email software on their PC such as Outlook, Eudora or Thunderbird. Furthermore, users generally will be unable to access their emails from cybercafes unless they know how to use Yahomail to pull emails from their POP3 accounts.

I will stop here for now. Get to the other points later

[expat1609]

hmm...thought it is file transfer protcol....but what advantage is it to have two or three of them ???

[kwchang]

FTP actually means File Transfer Protocol
It is a standard by which the web community use to copy files between computers. Basically you will need a computer to be configured to provide FTP services so that someone in the Internet (using an FTP client software) may send or copy files from the harddisk in the server.

When is this used?
Basically it is used for web-servers. You see, the webmasters need to have a means of posting his webpages to the server before the internet users can see the webpages. FTP is used for this purpose as the webmaster is given a password and userid to access the server via FTP. With this protocol, the webmaster then is able to manipulate his files on the server as if he was doing it with the server infront of him. Of course, the server may be in Russia and the webmaster is actually in USJ.

Hacking
Once a server has FTP activated, hackers can get into the server using FTP. This is provided the hacker can breach the security levels installed. Sometimes they do it through loop-holes in the applications on the server. Nonetheless, the passage may be provided by the FTP. I am the webmaster of our office's web-server and it was hacked. One of the solutions we used to stop the hacker was to disable FTP, amongst other protocols. This denied avenues of access and the hacker was stopped from doing further damage.

Why do you need it for a mailserver?
As the adminstrator, you will need the FTP to manage the stuff on the mail server, especially if it is a webmail server. You will need that to add or delete users, change passwords, adminsters group names and so on. Hence, you see, it is not just for web servers.

There is another protocol called Telnet. Since you did not ask, we can leave that out. More confusion for the layman.