Knowledge Base

The Internet Explained?

The Internet is simply the name we give to a vast network made up of millions of interconnected computers and the method by which they can communicate with one another. They can be connected in a number of different ways, but for home users the most common is through a modem. This is a small box that allows your computer to talk to another computer using a standard telephone line. Once connected to the Internet you become a part of it.

In order that we (our computers) can identify one another in this vast sea of computers, each one must be given a unique address number, called an IP address (Internet Protocol address). These numbers aren't easy to remember, so a few special computers, called Domain Name Servers, are also connected to the Internet and are used as giant lookup directories so that we can use "friendly" names instead. It is rather analogous to the house/street/town/county addresses we use for houses that mean something to us humans, and the Post Codes we allocate to them which can be handled more easily by the computerised Post Office sorting centres.

These friendly names are called Domain Names. The Internet equivalent of the Post Office sorting centre is called a Network Router. The Internet contains a very large number of these. An interesting, and not accidental, feature of the Internet is that if a Network Router should stop working, another will take over its work in exactly the same way as that if a Post Office sorting centre was rendered inoperative, another would take over its work.

What is the World Wide Web (or WWW)?

The World Wide Web, often now just called The Web, is a way of making the Internet easy to use by everyone, including those who know little about computers or the workings of them. The Web uses the Internet to allow Web Browsers to connect with Web Servers and display pages from Web Sites held on those servers.

If you still want to find out more about the Internet try some of these links
internet101.org

What is a hosting plan?

A hosting plan is an agreement with a web site hosting company such as Verio to provide you with disk space for your website and any data used by it, and to provide a reliable and high bandwidth connection between the your web site and the Internet.

A good hosting company will also ensure that your web site and data are regularly backed up onto removable media and stored offsite in case of fire or other disasters.
In the event that their primary facilities are destroyed, they should have alternative facilities so that the web site and data can be restored onto another server and be back on the Internet as quickly as possible.

What is a domain name?

Computers don’t speak to each other in English. Behind the scenes they use binary and other intelligible codes to communicate. One of theses codes is called the IP address is used to identify any machine on the Internet. This code is made up of four numeric fields separated by a full stop. The IP address for the web server running the Google web search engine, for example, is currently 216.239.39.101 and you can verify this by entering it into your web browser’s URL field as http://216.239.39.101

People find names much easier to remember than numbers so the internet has a bunch of machines it calls Domain Name Server which it uses like an automated phone book. This means we can give computers nice names and get the internet to look up the number for us and connect us automatically. So when we use the URL http://www.google.com a Domain Name Server on the internet intercepts our request to communicate with the machine www.google.com (which is a web server), and replaces the name with the correct IP address.