Basics Of Web Servers
To create a website and to host it in the internet, one needs a little bit of technical knowledge. Even a computer novice can easily host a website with basic internet and web server knowledge. The jargon ‘web server’ refers to a high speed computer storing web pages, that serves web pages to its requesters. Choosing an appropriate web hosting provider is the first step in hosting a website instead of looking for cheap web hosting providers. Website hosting providers will receive the website from the clients and will store the web pages in the centralized web server, which will be accessible by anyone connected to the internet. Internet started out in the late 1960s as a project on “new network technologies”. The link between the two research groups UCLA and Stanford Research Institute lead to ARPANET, the predecessor to internet. More feature addition to this basic network became internet. There are wide spread standards for internet which makes communication across various hardware platforms possible.
Browser is a piece of software that accepts a URL, fetches and displays a web page to the users. The computer on the other end of internet communication is a client. The name ‘client’ makes sense itself, meaning a requester of service. From the computer and internet view point, both the communicating entities the client and the server are two computers, what is also called as hardware. Hardware works well only if someone tells it what to do and how to do, which is taken care of by software. Browser is also a piece of software, which helps map a complex IP address into an easier domain names. The web server coordinates data transfer between the two communicating parties using a common rule or protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol(HTTP).
The browser uses the URL to locate a web page in the web server. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) has many parts separated by periods. The various parts involved are:
• Transfer Protocol: The type of content that is transferred and the mode of transfer. In this category there are limited options like HTTP, FTP, etc..
• Domain: This forms the last part of the URL indicating the category to which the contents of the website belongs to. For example, commercial industries’ website ends with .com and there are a multitude of options for this part like .net, .com, .edu, .gov etc…
• Domain Name: This forms the unique part of the website, which differs for every site. And it is packed in between the Protocol and the domain. For example, in the URL www.google.com, google is the domain name.
The browser gets the address from the user, prepares a request and passes the request to the web server. The server, on the receipt of request, dismantles the request and searches for the page, if the page is found, then the page is displayed on the browser, else an error code is returned.