The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signalling protocol used for establishing sessions in an IP network.  It’s a network communications protocol commonly employed for Voice over IP (VoIP) signaling. In VoIP networking, SIP is an alternative approach to signaling using the H.323 protocol standards. SIP was designed to support the calling features of traditional telephone systems as well as to be a general-purpose way to set up real-time multimedia sessions between groups of participants. In addition to simple telephone calls, SIP can also be used to set up video and audio multicast meetings, or instant messaging conferences.

SIP works in roughly the same way as other common protocols like HTTP or SMTP. It carries out the signaling by sending small messages, consisting of a header and a body. SIP is an open-source protocol meaning that many developers have access to the protocol source code. It is developed therefore by a large group of people, both commercial and non-commercial. It’s an organic protocol under constant development and improvement.

BitTorrent is a leading Peer 2 Peer file distribution protocol. It is a network system for the download of movies, software, music and other large files over the Internet. It’s peer 2 peer nature enables users to connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. There is a tracker which coordinates the action of all such peers. The ideology of BitTorrent is that users should upload (transmit outbound) at the same time they are downloading (receiving inbound.) which ensures that the network bandwidth is utilized as efficiently as possible.

The BitTorrent network is designed to support simultaneous upload and download involving many people, also referred to as “swarms.” Its efficient network bandwidth utilization makes BitTorrent an ideal choice for those looking to download a large movie file, music file, or open software package that is currently being shared on the Internet.

In most of the other P2P networks, ordinary Internet users trade files by directly connecting one-to-one while with BitTorrent, the advantage is that files can be shared without having access to a proper server, and because of this there is little accountability for the contents of the files. Bit Torrent requires use of a software client to download a file. However, the BitTorrent client and protocol do not support searching for P2P files. Instead, BitTorrent users must search on Web sites for music, movies and other file references called torrents.

Dedicated IP address also known as static IP means that a website has its own separate IP address. Whether you type in your URL or the numeric form of its IP address, both will bring you to the same domain.

Shared IP address means that multiple websites share the same IP address. Web servers can determine by the domain entered in a user’s browser which website is being requested. Typing in the IP address will bring you to some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want.

Generally, having a website on a shared IP address does not harm a website but a Dedicated IP address has it’s own use. A dedicated IP is needed for Anonymous FTP access, or for site having own Private SSL Certificate.

Another benefit of having a dedicated ip address is being able to access your site through the IP address directly. For example:

Dedicated IP account: 67.19.72.118

Shared IP account: 67.19.72.116/~youraccount

It is also believed that sites on a dedicated IP address are favoured more by the search engines over the sites on a shared IP but it’s just a myth. In most cases, this doesn’t affect sites on a shared IP. Dedicated IP hosting is required if you need to have some sort of special access to your website, like SSL or Anonymous FTP. If you have no special requirements, then a shared IP will work fine under most conditions.

Apache is an open-source HTTP server and is used to serve your site. Apache handlers tell the server how to deal with web files that need to be processed on the server. While Mime types tell browsers how to handle specific extensions. The text/html mime type equates to .htm, .html, and .shtml extensions on most servers, and this tells the browser to interpret all files with those extensions as HTML files. Many people consider Apache handlers and MIME types as having the same functionality. Both MIME types and Apache handlers have one thing in common though. Both give instructions so far as handling files is concerned. But, while MIME types tell the ‘browser’ how to handle files, Apache handlers tell the ’server’ how to handle files.

It is one of the base protocols of the Internet protocol suite. With this, all programs can send messages known as ‘data diagrams’ to one another however it is comparatively less reliable than TCP.

It is relatively fast and efficient for many time-sensitive purposes and is also useful for small servers; UDP is basically needed for broadcast as well as multi-cast.

Network applications that make use of this protocol are inclusive of Domain Name System, streaming media applications, Voice over IP, Trivial File Transfer Protocol.

It is a Real-time Transport Protocol extension which was presented by Phil Zimmermann, Jon Callas and Alan Johnston to the IETF on 5^th March 2006. It basically mentions the Diffie-Hellman key agreement for Secure Real-time Transport Protocol. The SIP is a VoIP standard.