A Beginner's Guide to the Internet's Working

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We all are using hundreds of websites daily on the internet. There's barely a day passing without opening a website. All these websites are considered to be served on the internet using a web server.

For example, "google.com".

Whenever we open the website, it fetches all the web pages related to the website. But it doesn't show all at once. As the user enters more into the website, web pages open one by one. Both websites and webpages are shown on the web browser by the web server.

Basically, a web server is a computer that hosts a website on the internet.

NOTE: "The Internet is an infrastructure, and the Web is a service built on top of this infrastructure. The Internet is a big network of many computers that communicates all together."

Web Page

A web page is a file containing the structure of information in HTML format. It basically allows the users over a web browser to fetch the web page from the internet. For example, the website Wikipedia has multiple Html files which help in understanding the context of a topic through web pages.

NOTE: "A website can have different and multiple types of web pages."

Web Site

A website can be a single or multiple web page site. It consists of many resources other than HTML files. In a multiple-page website, it should be worked as dynamic or have additional CSS files to make easier buttons and logical javascript for better change between web pages.

A website has its unique domain name. A user can reach it by just entering the name of a website on a web browser. For example, amazon.com

Web Server

As the web pages are created and a domain name is also purchased, a web server hosts all the web pages to a single, unique web server. And it is now available to be accessed by the domain name from anywhere else in the world.

Basically, a web server is a computer that hosts all those web pages under one IP address and then fetches all they once requested. It uses HTTP(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) protocols to fetch the user's requests.

Some examples of web servers are, Apache HTTP Server, Nginx

Domain Name

All websites have a unique IP address. For example "142.250.190.78" is the IP address to ping the servers of "google.com"

But it is hard for a user to remember the name of such a complicated address, that's where the domain name comes into the picture. A domain name is a secure-reserved name for a particular website over a web server. It helps users to reach the website by just entering their name onto the web browser.

Both domain name and IP address target to the same web server, which is google.com.

How a web server works

A web server works on both hardware and software.

For hardware, it accesses all the web pages stored on a computer and shares them on the web. For software, the hosting of web pages is done by an HTTP protocol. An HTTP protocol is a server that identifies the URL of a web address.

Whenever a user hits the website URL to any web browser the HTTP server identifies the web URL and fetches the desired web pages to the user. If it is unable to find then it throughs 404 error.

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