FACT: behind every website is a computer much like yours

As I write this I’m knee deep in some pretty computer-geeky work, and I thought it might be appropriate to shed some light on the infrastructure behind the magic of the internet. Specifically the under-appreciated workhorse… the web host server. The computer geeks out there will be familiar with all this, but for the average computer user the hardware of the internet may yet be a big mystery.

Every website is nothing more than a collection of files. For the most part, only plain text files, and images. Websites are written in HTML; hyper text mark-up language. Hyper text was the original term for a link (the blue, underlined “click here” thingies), and mark-up refers to text formatting. If you want to make something bold in HTML, the mark-up code would look like <strong>this</strong>. Your internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc) translates that code into the lovely result you see before you.

The files are hosted on a web server, a computer whose sole job is to serve up these HTML files as requested. That computer is really not much different than your own computer, with a fast CPU, lots of RAM, and really big hard drives for file storage. The biggest difference is that the server computer has no keyboard, mouse, or monitor attached to it. No human ever goes near it unless there’s a hardware failure. It lives in a room, called a data centre, with probably hundreds, if not thousands of other computers just like it.

So with billions of websites on millions of computers scattered all over the world, how do you correctly find MY page? Well that server, hosting my files, has an IP (internet protocol) address. So do you. Every computer connected to the internet has a unique IP address that is very much like a phone number. The further you go along, the more geographically specific it gets. Website addresses are stored in a massive phone book that connects the easy to remember LSNED.com to the not so user-friendly 216.22.24.67 IP address, which points it to the correct server in Mclean, Virginia, and dishes up your daily fact. Ta Da!

Bonus Fact: A few web server computers run on the Microsoft Windows operating system, but the vast majority use open-source Linux / Unix for the highest levels of stability and security. So right now, Linux dominates the internet, and Microsoft dominates the desktop… but Linux is moving ever more strongly into homes and schools with software that is affordable (free!) and easy. Linux is not just for geeks anymore!

• Source: just me
• If you want to learn more about Linux operating systems, take a look at Ubuntu