Well, make that Google and Wikipedia.

As a web designer/developer you need to find answers to certain questions quickly. Most of the time you can just type in error messages in the search bar and you will have a lot of instances where that same error was mentioned. No need to reinvent the wheel!

Firefox comes with a Google bar nowadays. Something that a lot of people don’t know is that, when you have the Google bar installed, you can just type a word or some words in the address bar and Google will bring up the website that is the number 1 search result. If I type “wordpress themes” in the address bar, my browser automatically brings me to themes.wordpress.com. So if you don’t know where to find Firefox add-ons, you don’t need to first go to Google, then type in the words “firefox addons”, hit enter and then click on the first link. Just type in the search term in your browser’s address bar, and you are redirected to the addons page of Firefox.

The same goes for Internet Explorer with Google Bar installed.

Neat huh?

As explained earlier, there is a database that keeps the user friendly names for websites and the IP address of the computer where the website is hosted. Let me use an every day example to explain how this works.

The mall
A mall is simply a building owned by an individual person or organization, which is split up in units which are then rented out for individual shop owners to do their business. These units are setup with electricity and water, the security is put in place, etc, things a shop owner does not need to worry about, because the mall takes care of those. The shop owner only needs to setup his shop according to his taste and corporate identity, to attract customers. In this case, please note that the mall owner is not responsible to attract customers for the shop. The shop owner then puts up a sign with the name of his company in front of the shop. This shop owner then needs to register his shop at for instance the local Chamber of Commerce (CoC), where a record of his shop will be stored.

If I wanted to get in touch with this company I could go to the CoC and ask for that name. They will then give me an address. When I would go to that address I would see one huge mall, with a lot of small units. To know where the shop I’m looking for is located, I will look on the store locater, the big sign with a list of all the stores and their unit number. Most of the time there is also a small map of the mall where you can see where your desired unit is . You then walk up to that unit, to find the story you are looking for, and you enter to see what they have to offer.

The comparison
This is a simple example to explain how domain names are processed. You type in the name of the desired site in your browser. The name is looked up in the DNS database and the IP address of the host of your website is extracted. You then are sent to that IP address where you will “meet” a local Name Server, kind of like the store locater in the mall, who will bring your request to the right unit. Once in that unit, you can see the website that is put there for you.

Of course you understand that this is a very simplified explanation. The real processes are far more complicated then this. But in short, this is what happens when you type in an URL.

DNS in short
So, in short, the Domain name services have a lot of functions, but the most important function is to translate domain names (www.afewgoodnotes.com) into IP addresses (64.202.123.201), so we need to remember user friendly names instead of all those numbers.

Even though I think it’s clear for a lot of folks what you need to have a website online, it’s good to summarize it so now and then, because it can help refresh the memory, but it is also valuable information for those who don’t.

To have a website online, the most important things you need are a website (DUH!) a domain and hosting.

The website
I think it’s kinda obvious that, if you want to put a website online, you need a website. A website is just a collection of web documents (web pages) that are linked to each other. I think the most important difference between a website and a book is that in a book, you browse the pages in a linear sense (we read from left to right, by turning pages from right to left) but on a website the pages are hyperlinked to each other. This means that you don’t need to turn 200 pages to get to some information, you just click and you are brought to that page.

A website can consist of text, images, pictures, sound and other multimedia components. The choice of (how much of) which components to use is made by the web designer, after hearing what the customer wants. All of these components are glued together with HTML. We will talk about HTML another time.

Hosting
Now you have your website, all those web pages, linking to each other. For this website to be visible to others, it needs to be stored on a computer with a connection to the Internet. Yes, that can actually be any computer. To be able to cater your website to the rest of the world, you need to install a webserver. Simply put, this webserver will process the requests of pages and provide whatever information is asked from it. So if I was to put a link in this document to the page with my information and you would click that link, you are asking the webserver to display the “About Rehuël” page. The webserver would then look for the page and process the HTML to be sent to your browser. If the page is not found, you get an appropriate warning.

But to be able to cater your website to a global Internet audience, your computer will need to be online 24/7. This brings up some important questions:

• Do you have the power backup to keep your computer running constantly, even when the utility company fails?
• Is your computer strong enough to process the (possibly) thousands of page requests it will daily receive?
• Is your Internet connection wide enough to let all the requests and their responses through?
• Do you have the right security measures in place?
• Will you be able to pay all the relevant license fees

If all of these questions can be answered with “yes” you can skip to the heading “Domain name”. you are then capable of hosting your website yourself. If at least one of these questions is answered with “no” please consider using virtual hosting.

Because they know that the cost to maintain a web host are very high, some companies install very strong servers, while investing in the most important aspects, like speed, security, power. A software, capable of creating virtual web servers in small units on the machine is installed and those small virtual servers are sold. The customer does not have to worry too much about electricity failing, bandwidth problems, server security, because all these aspects are taken care off. So all you need to do is pay a monthly fee and upload your website.

Domain name
Now we have our web pages on our machine, with a connection to the Internet. On the Internet every computer is identified by an IP address, just like everyone has a postal address. But IP addresses, which consist of 4 3-digit numbers separated with dots, would not be easy to remember. The Yahoo! site is on a computer with IP 209.191.93.52, the Google site on a computer with IP 216.239.37.99, etc. Imagine having to remember all these IP addresses to be able to visit these sites. Also take in consideration that there are virtual hosting services, which means that there can be more then one website hosted on a computer with 1 IP address.

To give website names that were more human readable, understandable and memorable, the domain name was invented. These domain names are supplied by registrars, who keep a record. So when you register a domain name, you need to link it to an IP address. When this domain name is typed in the browser, it is checked against the database to see on which IP address to look for the requested website. In my case, ff you would type in www.afewgoodnotes.com, the name is checked to find out which IP to look for. Your browser then communicates with the webserver on that IP address with requests to see whatever there is stored there to be shown.

Of course there is a little more involved when there are multiple websites stored on one server, because how will he server know which site to display? An understanding of DNS could answer this, but that is a topic I will talk about some other time wrote about in this article.

Hello there, welcome to my blog. This will be the place where I will be writing about my experiences related to my work. Most of my ranting will be done at my other blog, where I will mainly write about my country.

I am a web designer with knowledge and experience in working with web standards (XHTML, CSS), PHP and MySQL. I’ve been doing this work for about 6 years now.

In Suriname, South America, where I live, affordable and reliable hosting and domain name registration is not too easily accessible. To create the opportunity for everyone to be present on the Internet, I got me a dedicated server with WHM/cPanel, so I can provide high quality hosting for relative little money. I also got an account with Enom Inc. to be able to register domains myself, so my customers don’t have to go through a lot of processes.

Please feel free to comment on my articles. Correct me where I am mistaken, fill in the blanks if I leave blanks. Link to my blog(s) and I will mention your blog in mine, with a brief description.