The workings of a server
By
Staff
So you want a
web-site? But you don’t know a server side from
a sunny side up and you think a host has
something to do with church? Not to worry.
It is easy to
get lost in the jargon, especially when we
venture into areas we may not know very well.
Our natural reaction is to just nod our
heads and not to ask - we don’t want to seem
stupid. And no area is considered more foreign
to most consumers than technology. The good
news is that armed with a little bit of
knowledge, broken down into plain English, you
can understand what is going on behind the
scenes when you select a web hosting provider
for your web site.
I’m sure you
know from the research you’ve done so far that
the first step to establishing your web presence
is to find a company that will host your web
site – they are going to put it on their
computers – Web servers - and make it available
to your prospective customers so you don’t have
to.
This is a good
opportunity to step back and use that plain
English we talked about. Web server – what’s
that? It is just a computer, though usually a
powerful one that stores information. That’s
all there is to it. In the case of a Web
server, it stores Web documents and in the most
basic sense, makes them available to anyone with
an Internet connection. If you want to read
more detailed definitions, go to Google and type
in “define Web server”. From there you can go
to a page with summary definitions – nice
because you don’t have to wade through a bunch
of other unrelated stuff.
Before we move
on, let’s talk a bit about what the Internet is
and what it means to be connected to it. The
Internet started as a project to test what were
then, new networking technologies. The first
two links were between UCLA and the Stanford
Research Institute in the late 1960s. This
formed “ARPANET”, the precursor to our
Internet. More computer networks sprang up and
were added, and the Internet was born. One
reason the Internet works is that the networking
technologies include standards so that each
computer network (and the computers within it)
can “talk” to each other and exchange
information. The process of finding the
computer you wanted to communicate with used to
be a bit daunting; lots of computer-ese and
numbers to remember – until a little piece of
software called the “browser” was written. Read
on.
So we have
talked about one side of the equation: a
computer – our Web server – that stores Web
documents and is connected to the Internet,
allowing other people access to these
documents. The other side of the connection is
also a computer that is connected to the
Internet and allows people to request and
retrieve the Web documents stored on the Web
server. The second computer is referred to as a
client. If you think about it in plain English,
it makes sense. A client is someone who is
requesting service, whether it is an oil change
or a data exchange. The server and the client –
our two sides of the equation – are computers,
what is called hardware. Hardware doesn’t work
unless you also have software to tell it what to
do. This is where the browser we mentioned
comes in. The browser simplifies the task of
navigating the Web by letting us associate a
complex computer address with a simpler, more
user-friendly name; the domain name.
So the browser tells the
client computer what to do. The Web server must
also have software that negotiates data
transfers to and from the clients using their
common language – a communications protocol –
called http (hypertext transfer protocol).
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