Glossary
Content Management System (CMS)
This is a piece of software that usually lives on the server. It allows you, the website owner, and your lackeys (people who work for you) to manage the content of your website (the words, links, and images) without having to muck about in FTP, SSH, or any other complex webmaster tools. Read our short article on CMSs or learn more about CMSs on the wikipedia.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
This is a software standard for transferring files between computers with different operating systems, usually over an internet connection. People usually transfer their website files from their home computer to the webserver computer using an FTP client. Learn more about FTP on the wikipedia.
MySQL
This is an open source relational database. We like 
it because it’s powerful, fully-featured, and completely open source. PHP can talk to a MySQL database using SQL. You can download and install it yourself from MySQL.com.
Open Source
There is a non-proft organization dedicated to encouraging open source programming called the Open Source Initiative, and they explain it best: “The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.”
Read more about it on the wikipedia.
PHP
This recursively-named language is a server-side scripting language that stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. 
It looks a lot like perl and works like many other server-side languages (e.g. ASP). If your website has php pages, that means that fancy dynamic stuff can happen on the server, but the user is sent only regular HTML so they don’t need to have any fancy plugins (e.g. flash) or local languages enabled (e.g. javascript). Read all about it on PHP.net.
Registrar
This is the company that has control of your domain name. They will keep track of the fact that who owns this domain name, how long until it expires, and where hosting servers it should point to.
SQL
This is an acronym that stands for “Structured Query Language” which is the ‘language’ (some would dispute that it really is one) that we use to talk to most relational databases, like MySQL.
Website Host
This is the company on whose computer your website files live. They have a big strong computer called a server that has all the files for your website. When someone types your domain name into their web browser, the browser will get the files (html, images, text, etc) from the website host’s server.