Internal Organs of a website

I often hear my friends asking me how do we make a website, or where do i get it. Initially i used to tell them, you need to buy a domain, a web hosting space. After few days they ask me to help setup everything for them. Its after a while I understood that this was because of my incomplete response.

This article is for those people who are new to these terms, who feel they can never understand the jargon of website, domain names, web hosting.

Familiarize with some basic terms used while dealing with website 🙂

1. Domain Name – Its your website name like abc.com or www.abc.com
2. IP address – Every system on the internet is assigned a numeric address, eg 64.4.12.45.
3. Web Hosting Space / Hosting Account – A fixed disk space purchased in which you can store your files / website content. This space is accessible from internet.
4. Nameservers – These are systems on internet that does the job of translating the domain names into ip address for your web browsers. For eg. U typing www.abc.com in your system, a request is sent to the nameserver requesting ip address of the www.abc.com and then your browser connects to that ip address and retrieves the website contents.

Domain names, why do we need them ?

Every computer on the internet has an ip address, a unique one for every single system, including yours now. You can connect to other systems on the internet or access websites stored on other systems by connecting to the ip address of hat system.

It isnt easy to remember ip address of all your favorite websites, is it ? how about 182.31.63.253 INSTEAD OF ASHOKJP.COM. DIFFICULT RIGHT ? Thats why domain names were introduced. A domain name xyz.com is easier to remember, it is tied to these ip addresses. You purchase a name of your choice and update its configuration to point to the unfriendly ip address.

First, when we think about a website, what are the things that come to our mind?

1. 1. A website name – www.abc.com
2. 2. A web browser – Google chrome or Firefox
3. 3. Website Content

All these 3 are seperate individual parts of a website mentioned in their order of importance.

A website name is obtained from a domain registrar company,

Website content is stored in online space purchased from a web hosting company.

99% companies provide all this in 1 package eventhough both of them are different products. You can choose to register domain with one provider and store your website content in another.

When a user types www.abc.com in their web browser (chrome/firefox), the browser checks for nameservers of abc.com. The browser then connects to the nameserver to get the ip address of the system which has your website content (web hosting server in technical terms). The server then returns the website content.

The domain name is your identity on the internet, always collect your username|password to login and manage your domain. This is the logins that are required to update nameservers. Nameservers point your registered domain name to where your website content is stored.

–draft–