How Websites Work

Ever wonder how a website gets to your monitor when you're browsing the internet? What makes this possible?  Before we dive into what happens when you visit a website, we need to go over a few quick concepts.

Servers

Websites are nothing more than files on a computer somewhere in the world. These files are basically full of text that tell your browser- which is the program you use to view webpages -  how to display text, images, links, etc.  The computers that host websites are called servers. When you type in an address, such as www.alterimaging.com, you are viewing a file located on a server that Alter Imaging manages.

Domain Names

Each server is usually associated with a domain name, which is an easy to remember website address. An example of a domain name is www.alterimaging.com.

IP Addresses

Each server has its own IP address, which acts like a telephone number for that server. An IP address looks like this: 70.32.111.22.

DNS Servers

Without DNS Servers, any time you wanted to visit a website, you would have to put in the IP address. Since memorizing IP addresses for all your favorite websites isn't that fun, DNS servers associate IP addresses with domain names. So when you type in alterimaging.com, the DNS server associates that domain name with the IP address 128.121.139.140.

Putting It All Together

So let's say you want to visit alterimaging.com. You type "alterimaging.com" into your browser's address bar, your browser sends a request to the DNS server saying you want to visit this domain.  The DNS server then provides the browser with the IP address and points it to the correct server.  The server receives the requests and sends the file.

Dynamic Content

Servers aren't just for sending files to your browser. They can also run programs. Let's use Google for an example.

Whenever you search for something on Google, it runs a program, or script, that goes through its database of websites to deliver a search results page.

For example, if you searched for "hamburgers", you would be given a search results page with the results you requested. Take a look at the following diagram:



If you searched for a different word, the "search" file that is sent to you would have different results.

Dynamic content is not always generated by the server. Using client-side scripting languages, such as JavaScript, some content can be dynamically generated without the use of a server.

An example of this would be a loan calculator on a website. Instead of performing calculations by sending the numbers you've inputed into the calculator to the server, the result can be calculated using your computer.

I hope this has helped you learn a little bit about how a website gets to you.