How the Internet actually works

To most people, the Internet is the place to which everyone plugs in their computer and views webpages and sends e-mail. That's a very human-centric viewpoint, but if we're to truly understand the Internet, we need to be more exact:

The Internet is THE large global computer network that people connect to by-default, by virtue of the fact that it's the largest. And, like any computer network, there are conventions that allow it to work.

This is all it is really - a very big computer network. However, this article will go beyond explaining just the Internet, as it will also explain the 'World Wide Web'. Most people don't know the difference between the Internet and Web, but really it's quite simple: the Internet is a computer network, and the Web is a system of publishing (of websites) for it.

Computer networks

And, what's a computer network? A computer network is just two or more of computers connected together such that they may send messages between each other. On larger networks computers are connected together in complex arrangements, where some intermediary computers have more than one connection to other computers, such that every computer can reach any other computer in the network via paths through some of those intermediary computers.

Computers aren't the only things that use networks - the rail network is very similar to computer networks, just that transports people instead of information.
Trains operate on a certain kind of track - such a convention is needed, because otherwise the network could not effectively work. Computers in a network have conventions too, and we usually call these conventions 'protocols'.

There are many kinds of popular computer network today. The most conventional by far is the so-called 'Ethernet' network that physically connects computers together in homes, schools and offices. However, WiFi is becoming increasingly popular for connecting together devices so that cables aren't required at all.

Connecting to the Internet

When you connect to the Internet, you're using networking technology, but things are usually a lot muddier. There's an apt phrase, "Rome wasn't built in a day" because neither was the Internet. The only reason the Internet could spring up so quickly and cheaply for people was because another kind of network already existed throughout the world - the phone network!

The pre-existence of the phone network provided a medium for ordinary computers in ordinary people's homes to be connected onto the great high-tech military and research network that had been developed in years before. It just required some technological mastery in the form of 'modems'. Modems allow phone lines to be turned into a mini-network connection between a home and a special company (an 'ISP') that already is connected up to the Internet. It's like a bridge joining up the road networks on an island and the mainland - the road networks become one, due to a special kind of connection between them.

The Internet

The really amazing about the Internet isn't the technology. We've actually had big Internet-like computer networks before, and 'The Internet' existed long before normal people knew the term. The amazing thing is that such a massive computer network could exist without being built or governed in any kind of seriously organised way. The only organisation that really has a grip on the core computer network of the Internet is a US-government-backed non-profit company called 'ICANN', but nobody could claim they 'controlled' the Internet, as their mandate and activities are extremely limited.

What I have described so far is probably not the Internet as you or most would see it. It's unlikely you see the Internet as a democratic and uniform computer network, and to an extent, it isn't. The reason for this is that I have only explained the foundations of the system so far, and this foundation operates below the level you'd normally be aware of. On the lowest level you would be aware of, the Internet is actually more like a situation between a getter and a giver - there's something you want from the Internet, so you connect up and get it. Even when you send an e-mail, you're getting the service of e-mail delivery.

Being a computer network, the Internet consists of computers - however, not all computers on the Internet are created equal. Some computers are there to provide services, and some are there to consume those services. We call the providing computers 'servers' and the consuming computers 'clients'. At the theoretical level, the computers have equal status on the network, but servers are much better connected than clients and are generally put in place by companies providing some kind of commercial service. You don't pay to view a web site, but somebody pays for the server the website is located on - usually the owner of the web site pays a 'web host' (a commercial company who owns the server).

Making contact

I've established how the Internet is a computer network: now I will explain how two computers that could be on other sides of the world can send messages to each other.

Imagine you were writing a letter and needed to send it to someone. If you just wrote a name on the front, it would never arrive, unless perhaps you lived in a small village. A name is rarely specific enough. Therefore, as we all know, we use addresses to contact someone, often using: the name, the house number, the road name, the town name, the county name, and sometimes, the country name. This allows sending of messages on another kind of network - the postal network. When you send a letter, typically it will be passed between postal sorting offices starting from the sorting office nearest to the origin, then up to increasingly large sorting offices until it's handled by a sorting office covering regions for both the origin and the destination, then down to increasingly small sorting offices until it's at the sorting office nearest the destination - and then it's delivered.

In our postal situation, there are two key factors at work - a form of addressing that 'homes in' on the destination location, and a form of message delivery that 'broadens out' then 'narrows in'. Computers are more organised, but they actually effectively do exactly the same thing.

Each computer on the Internet is given an address ('IP address'), and this 'homes in' on their location. The 'homing in' isn't done strictly geographically, rather in terms of the connection-relationship between the smaller computer networks within the Internet. For the real world, being a neighbour is geographical, but on a computer network, being a neighbour is having a direct network connection.

Like the postal network with its sorting offices, computer networks usually have connections to a few other computer networks. A computer network will send the message to a larger network (a network that is more likely to recognise at least some part of the address). This process of 'broadening out' continues until the message is being handled by a network that is 'over' the destination, and then the 'narrowing in' process will occur.

An example 'IP address' is '69.60.115.116'. They are just series of digit groups where the digit groups towards the right are increasingly local. Each digit group is a number between 0 and 255. This is just an approximation, but you could think of this address meaning:
A computer 116
in a small neighbourhood 115
in a larger neighbourhood 60
controlled by an ISP 69
(on the Internet)
The neighbourhoods, the ISP, and the Internet, could all be consider computer networks in their own right. Therefore, for a message to the same 'larger neighbourhood', the message would be passed up towards one of those intermediary computers in the larger neighbourhood and then back down to the correct smaller neighbourhood, and then to the correct computer.


Getting the message across

Now that we are able to deliver messages the hard part is over. All we need to do is to put stuff in our messages in a certain way such that it makes sense at the other end.

Letters we send in the real world always have stuff in common - they are written on paper and in a language understood by both sender and receiver. I've discussed before how conventions are important for networks to operate, and this important concept remains true for our messages.

All parts of the Internet transfer messages written in things called 'Packets', and the layout and contents of those 'packets' are done according to the 'Internet Protocol' (IP). You don't need to know these terms, but you do need to know that these simple messages are error prone and simplistic.
You can think of 'packets' as the Internet equivalence of a sentence - for an ongoing conversation, there would be many of them sent in both directions of communication.

Reliable message transfer on the Internet is done via 'TCP'. IP is fundamental to the Internet, but TCP is not - there are in fact other 'protocols' that may be used that I won't be covering.

Names, not numbers

When most people think of an 'Internet Address' they think of something like 'www.ocportal.com' rather than '69.60.115.116'. People relate to names with greater ease than numbers, so special computers that humans need to access are typically assigned names ('domain names') using a system known as 'DNS' (the 'domain name system').

All Internet communication is still done using IP addresses (recall '69.60.115.116' is an IP address). The 'domain names' are therefore translated to IP addresses behind the scenes, before the main communication starts.

At the core, the process of looking up a domain name is quite simple - it's a process of 'homing in' by moving leftwards through the name, following an interrogation path. This is best shown by example - 'www.ocportal.com' would be looked up as follows:
Every computer on the Internet knows how to contact the computers (the 'root' 'DNS servers') responsible for things like 'com', 'org', 'net' and 'uk'. There are a few such computers and one is contacted at random. The DNS server computer is asked if they know 'www.ocportal.com' and will respond saying they know which server computer is responsible for 'com'.
The 'com' server computer is asked it knows 'www.ocportal.com' and will respond saying they know which server computer is responsible for 'ocportal.com'.
'The 'ocportal.com' server computer is asked if it knows 'www.ocportal.com' and will respond saying that it knows the corresponding server computer to be '69.60.115.116'.

Note that there is a difference between a server computer being 'responsible' for a domain name and the domain name actually corresponding to that computer. For example, the 'ocportal.com' responsible DNS server might not necessarily be the same server as 'ocportal.com' itself.

Meaningful dialogue

I've fully covered the essence of how messages are delivered over the Internet, but so far these messages are completely raw and meaningless. Before meaningful communication can occur we need to layer on yet another protocol (recall IP and TCP protocols are already layered over our physical network).

There are many protocols that work on the communications already established, including:
HTTP - for web pages, typically read in web browser software
POP3 - for reading e-mail
SMTP - for sending e-mail

I'm not going to go into the details of any of these protocols because it's not really relevant unless you actually need to know it.

The information transferred via a protocol is usually a request for something, or a response for something requested. For example, with HTTP, a client computer requests a certain web page from a server via HTTP and then the web server, basically, responds with the file embedded within HTTP.

Each of these protocols operates on more or more so-called 'ports', and it is these 'ports' that allow the computers to know which protocol to use. For example, a web server (special computer software running on a server computer that serves out web pages) uses a port of number '80', and hence when the server receives messages on that port it passes them to the web server software which naturally knows that they'll be written in HTTP.

The World Wide Web

I've explained how the Internet works, but not yet how the web works. The web is the publishing system that most people don't realise is distinguishable from the Internet itself.
The Internet uses IP addresses (often found via domain names) to identify resources, but the web has to have something more sophisticated as it would be silly if every single page on the Internet had to have it's own 'domain name'. The web uses 'URLs' (uniform resource locators), and I'm sure you know about these as nowadays they are printed all over the place in the real world.

A typical URL looks like this: :///

For example: http://www.ocportal.com/index.php

Something About Niche Hosting

One cannot deny the fact that, the reach of internet is vast and through out the world and when it comes to marketing scenario the customer is consider being ultimate. He/she is an individual who comes to the market with well defined objectives and requirements. Thus it is a challenge for a hosting provider to aim customer’s well defined objectives. Web host needs to move straight forwards with the certain strategy focusing on the futures such as price, uptime, reliability, support etc.

A few time ago there was a research conducted about the selling aspect of the hosting industry. Can a low priced host perform well? How nice it will be if a low priced host will propose features like maximum bandwidth and disk space. At the end the conclusion was that the largest host would be the low priced host with the maximum bandwidth and disk space, with an outstanding support and placing advertisements all over the client’s site. It can be useful for several people, but the Return of Investment (ROI) may consume the entire life-time of a person.

The web hosting industry contains majority of SMEs. For them large investments in marketing may not provide results as per expectations. Still one can find several web hosts in the market who have flourished themselves from a mere reseller hosting system to a thousand servers within a little spare of time. It is quite surprising that the number of hosts selling at low price was zero. They had done nothing but created a niche market for their purpose.

One web host concentrated merely on resellers and termed it as private label reseller programs. They gave out additional amount of disk space and bandwidth and demanded for additional charge. Their merits - slighter customers, advanced cash turnover and comparatively smaller support requests as the resellers takes care of their own customers. Another web host concentrated merely on webmasters. In fact, Webmasters usually possess more than one site. Hosting cannot be considered their main business and they demand a reasonable solution. In addition to it, the majority of webmasters have the technical knowledge and in comparison they require a community where interaction with other webmasters is possible.

Everyone knows that in a little span of time identical things take the place in market and adopts the standardization of industry. This is again test the way to effectively control the market by the host. They can take the step to concentrate on merely on certain services of hosting. For instance, email only hosting. This can be very helpful for the people for whom email is highly decisive. The user may go for the emails on another server which is totally dedicated to emails only. Thus, if by chance the prime site faces downtime, they still have an alternative route to get the mails. One can take backup hosting as another suitable example. At this juncture, the web host would backup the whole information related to a site in a frequent period of time.

Web hosting provider can also concentrate on definite languages and software which are very well-liked. There is not majority of hosts offering Java Servlets, Postgresql, and Zope. If one takes the example of only Zope hosting then it definitely escort all the Zope developers to apply and as well as propose the Zope community a web hosting provider who is specialized in field of Zope hosting.

Everyone knows that price of broadband had declined by the time, it also created a ray of optimism in the mind of web hosts that due to this the market of application hosting also gets popularity. One can find new market of large and small corporate who never thinks badly in keeping their data in secure networks. All requires is to log into their servers and access their data from any part of the globe. They search for the applications like Compiere or rather a groupware where user can easily access, share and pile up the data online. If there will be a requirement for paying premium for such services the Corporate would never mind. But, web hosts have to promise protection and dependability in such situations.

Merging some of the additional features in the offered package will definitely attract the customers to that hosting provider. It can include few of the software’s also.

One can put forward hosting services along with a post nuke, gallery and phpBB forum all packaged into one. Due to this the customer will receive both opportunity and time to concentrate on what he/she requires to do instead of wasting time on thinking the way to implement a CMS system or picture gallery.

There are many sites offering software such as ikonboard, eZpublish, phpShop, Zope, A-Cart etc along with their hosting package. After selecting the ideal one as per requirement user can create scripts to automate the process of installation. Thus, one can save the time wasting on ordering new things.

At the end, user needs not to take any step like investing a huge amount of money for the purpose of advertising with search engines or rather with web hosting directories. All requires is to advertise on the elected software's home page and remain present on their forums/mailing lists to assist the client.