How Web Hosting Works

What should you know about how web hosting works? It's important because the more you know about how web hosting works, the more informed you'll be when choosing a domain name for your website and in selecting a Web host for your site. These are important decisions if you want to get a lot of traffic to your website. If you want to make money with your website, then getting a lot of traffic is the name of the game!

The great thing about the Web is that it isn't stored on a single computer or owned by a single company. Instead, it's millions of websites that are scattered across millions of Web hosts or Web servers all around the world. A Web host is a company or individual who operates Web servers that serve as hosts to websites.

In reality, the web is just a set of standards that enable all of these Web servers communicate with each other.

How Browsers Navigate the World Wide Web

Have you ever wondered how web hosting works and your browser finds Web pages that you are interested in when you do a search at a place like Google? Every Web page has what's known as a URL or Uniform Resource Locator.

A Uniform Resource Locator is the unique website address you type into your browser like www.google.com or www.create-a-great-website.com.

How Web Hosting Works - Understanding the URL

A URL consists of several pieces of information that identifies a Web page. Some of them are required and others are optional because the browser knows to fill them in.

Web addresses pack a lot of information into a single line of text. The URL to this website includes the following parts:

Uniform Resource Locator

It includes the following parts:

Protocol - is the first part of the URL and indicates how your browser should communicate with the Web server where the file is located. websites always use HTTP for HyperText Transport Protocol. This means that the protocol portion of the website address always uses http:// or https://.
Domain Name - the second part of the URL, the domain name, indicates the Web server that hosts the site you want to see. Server names usually start with www. a convention used to identify them as World Wide Web servers. Domain names are really just placeholder for a numeric address which is what your browser really needs to identify your site. If you're creating your own website and you want a lot of traffic to your site, the domain name you choose is a very important decision.
Path - The path identifies the folder where the Web server stores the specific file that you're looking for. This part of the URL may include several level of folders that make up the path to find the location of the file. You could have a folder within a folder within another folder and the path would identify each folder name in the path to the file on the Web server. For example, the path /hosts/free/myfiles/ refers to a folder called hosts that contains a folder called free that contains a folder called myfiles. The slashes in the path are ordinary forward slashes. This convention aligns with the file paths on many Unix-based computers which were some of the first to host websites.
File Name - The file name is the last part of the path. It identifies the exact Web page that you're looking for. You can usually recognize a file name by the file extension .htm or .html, both of which stand for HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML was the predecessor to XHTML.

How Web Hosting Works - How Browsers See a URL

If you know the URL or website address of a particular page and you type it into the address bar, your browser does several things.

How a URL works

First, the browser needs to figure out what Web server to connect to. It gets that information from the domain name in the URL.
Second, to find the Web server named www.create-a-great-website.com the browser needs to convert the domain name into a computer friendly number called the IP address.

Every computer in the world has a unique IP address including Web servers and the computers you use at home and work. Each has it's own number or IP address. To find the IP address the browser looks up the domain name in a huge catalog called the DNS or Domain Name Service. Every domain name on the Web is listed there.

An IP address is a set of four numbers separated by periods. For example the website, www.create-a-great-website.com, may have an IP address
67.107.12.164.
The browser sends the page request to the IP address for the Web server. On the way back, the message may cross through many different web servers on the way to your computer.
When the server receives the request for a specific Web page, it looks first at the path and then the file name in the URL. In the example above, the server sees that the request is for a file named index.html in a folder named planning. It looks up that file and sends it back to the Web browser. If the file doesn't exist on the server, it sends an error message in place of the file.
When your browser receives the Web page from the server, it displays it for you to view.

Sometimes a URL doesn't include a file name. For example the URL, www.google.com, does not include any information about the path or file name. In this case, the browser just sends the request and lets the Web server decide what to do with it. The Web server sees that you aren't requesting a specific file and so it send back the default Web page for that URL. The default Web page for many sites are often named index.htm or index.html. This isn't always the case, however, as a Web administrator can designate any page as the Web page default.

Understanding how Web hosting works and the URL works can help you when you're ready to design your own Web pages or site so that your Web pages are easily found by browsers and those looking for the kind of content you provide on your website.

Once you know how Web hosting works, you can focus on getting yourself a good domain name, a Web host and then get your website online.

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