archive site


archive site

(networking)(Or "FTP site", "FTP archive") An Internethost where program source, documents, e-mail or newsmessages are stored for public access via anonymous FTP,Gopher, World-Wide Web or other document distributionsystem. There may be several archive sites for e.g. aUsenet newsgroup though one may be recognised as the mainone.

FTP servers were common on the Internet for many years beforethe World-Wide Web (WWW) was invented and are still used inpreference to web servers for serving large files such assoftware distributions. This is because FTP is more efficientthan HTTP, the protocol of the WWW. Many sites thereforerun both HTTP and FTP servers.

Some well-known archive sites include Imperial College, UK, UUNET, USA.

See also archie, GNU archive site, mirror.