Can someone please explain me what is Nameservers and what is Static IP? How they are useful...

It's really quite simple. In everyday terms, you can think of the namservers being a 411 directory service. The IP is the phone number. You call the directory assistance with the name of a person/business to get a phone number. The computer contacts a nameserver with the domain name and gets back an IP.

A Static IP can be different things. Depends on how the host defines it, but most commonly it means your own IP number not shared with anyone else. It's like your private phone line. Your own number and whenever I dial it up, it rings in your home/office.

A shared IP is like having many extensions on the same phone line. When you call a company, you ask for a specific extension. If you are on a shared IP, the computer gets the shared IP from the nameserver, then contacts that IP to get connected to the "extension" which is your web site.

Wazeh,

Congrats! You are great and wise... This is the best explanation found about this topic. Start writing manuals and you will become millionaire.
;)

Static IP - Broadly we can categorise all the machines (computers) attached to net as servers and clients. machines which offer web server, FTP etc to other machines are called servers and these other machines are called "clients". Each machines on the net is assigned a unique IP address, which is something like 11.22.33.44 This address helps packets (data) to move from origin to destination. Usually servers are assigned static IP address, which does not change very often.

It is very hard to remember these address in numbers. Right now you know more than 1000 web site addresses by name like... microsoft.com, IBM.com, sun.com etc... and even you may guess any web site by its company's name or barnd name... say cocacola.com or coke.com. Imagine if you have to rememeber following addresses in numbers like 12.23.45.56, 32.56.45.23.1, 12.32.36.36, etc... Therefore to remember these IP addresses we use more user friendly names which are nothing but alliases. Name server helps in translating these user friendly names to Ip address for machines and Ip address to user friendly name for human.

Thank you for your kindness Cravis :D

I do hope to make a special tutorial web site one day for all the new commers who know absolutly nothing about the net.

Very true... when I saw this post there was no reply and when I posted found "Wazeh's posting and realise that I wasted the time and still my explanation may not be clear enough. Great job Wazeh!

A static IP refers to an IP address that doesn't change over time or machine restarts. Most web hosts will provide you with a static IP. There are 2 types of static IPs:[list=1] Dedicated/unique static IP: Your web hosting account is assigned an IP that no one else is using. There are several benefits of having this, more information is available at: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=11906

Shared static IP: Your hosting account shares an IP with other accounts. Most hosting accounts will work just fine with shared static IPs so unless you really need your own IP, don't worry about it.[/list=1]Hope this helps.

Mark Vockler
Aletia Hosting

When do you need your static IP address ?

IP less accounts cannot have more than one FTP account nor SSL or Anonymous FTP. But I could be wrong.

Originally posted by freeva
IP less accounts cannot have more than one FTP account nor SSL or Anonymous FTP. But I could be wrong.

There is no reason why an 'IP less' or 'shared IP address' should limit the number of FTP accounts allowed on a system. There is no mapping between the two at all, and if you think about it would mean that all those shared ISP users could not be given thier own usernames to upload their sites...

On the other hand SSL enabled webservers do prevent more than 1 digital certificate form working behind the same IP address. This is coded into the webserver for security reasons, since the whole point of an SSL certificate is to say that this 'person is who they say they are' which can never be 100% on a shared IP address/webserver.