You’re digging deeper into the online world.
You’re realizing that there is more than YouTube videos.
You’re moving beyond basic Facebook and Twitter interactions.
You’re wanting more than just basic e-mail correspondence.
You’re realizing that there are many personal and business opportunities…if only you could step into the unknown region of the Internet.
Have no fear. Others have been down that same path.
I went through a phase several years ago where I loved the Matrix trilogy (I still like it a lot). I watched each of the movies several times. Once I did a marathon, and watched all three in a row.
Anyway, in the first movie, Neo is still stuck in the Matrix. He doesn’t know what it is or what implications there would be to him trying to find out. He was approached by Trinity, who led him to Morpheus. Morpheus had been searching for Neo and wanted to show him the truth about the Matrix.
In his discussion with Neo, Morpheus used Alice in Wonderland as an analogy. He was saying that it was like Alice going down the rabbit hole, not sure what was real and what wasn’t. But the curiosity was there. Growing and driving.
He gave Neo a choice, each represented by a pill – a red one and a blue one. If he took the blue pill, he would simply wake up and continue his life as he had known it. But if he took the red pill, Morpheus would take him to see how far the rabbit hole went.
Going Down the Rabbit Hole of the World Wide Web
Many casual web-surfers don’t realize – and probably don’t care – about what happens behind the scenes to give them the experiences they have as they visit the various websites. They just know that they click a button or link, and it does something.
We aren’t going to get real technical here, but we’ll bring you backstage and show you just a few basics to help you understand a little bit more.
Each website has to be hosted on a computer somewhere in the world – it’s not literally “in the clouds.” The computer that the website is hosted on is called a server. The server can be as small as a desktop computer (however, it wouldn’t be very powerful) or as large a room. It can be hosted in a person’s house or business, or it can be hosted on another company’s site.
The Internet is just a huge network of all the servers in the world. If you know the right address and have proper permission (i.e. you may need a username and password), you can access any of those servers and the respective websites on those servers.
Whenever a person gets online, their personal computer connects to the Internet through their service provider and requests a website. The request goes through the Internet, looking for the address provided (i.e. Google.com). When it finds the server (usually a few seconds or less), the request is processed, and the server sends back the requested website information. The personal computer receives the information and displays it on the monitor.
You may or may not ever need the details of how all of it works. It does help, though, to show that, if you are going to have a website, it must be hosted somewhere so that people can access it. There are several options that are available to you.
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