What is the Internet Anyways?

This week in VWC we are going over the high level concepts of how the internet works and the history. Everyone seems to have heard the term IP address at some point via the news, intro to computer class etc. IP stands for Internet Protocol and is used in conjunction with servers to identify a specific computer. You can think of this as the back end, or behind the scene, of a website name like www.google.com.

Another common term is URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. These are the platforms that the requests are made form servers to the computers. When a request is made of say a file the file is broken into smaller pieces, packets, and reassembled when it gets to the destination server. As the packets move from router to router in the process the packets are changing and pieces are being added until it reaches its destination. An easy way to remember this process is the “router” routes packets back and forth.

To simplify, a computer is known as a client and is connected to the internet via a internet service provider that does the work of requesting and moving the information from your computer to other servers. From these other servers your info will reach the destination you are sending to. The protocol that servers use to move the information is HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

So Hosting you ask?

Hosting is another area associated with all the connection processes in how the information is handled. Hosting services are companies that use servers in order to do all the heavy work associated with moving around your files throughout the internet. Instead of buying your own server you can use theirs instead.There are 5 ways that you can get hosting:

• Shared
• VPS
• Dedicated
• Cloud
• Managed

Out of all of these shared seems to be the most common and cheapest in terms of use but you can check out the details here for the comparison of all five.

It’s been fun being your HOST for this post.

Until next time,

Brad