According to CSO figures from 2019, 80% of Irish people use the internet on a daily basis. One would wonder how many of those could explain how the internet provides them with information. In this post I will attempt to demystify the processes behind the pervasive internet.
To explain how the trillions of gigabytes of data are transferred acorss the global network of computers that is the Internet, it may be best to being with the creation of web content, which is built using code. This can be seen as a language to convey displayed content . This content is hosted on a domain name server, which is given a unique Internet Protocol address to differentiate one page of content from another. A domain name server is then used to match IP addresses with given names for pages. Information is hosted on a server, which must be live at all times if the content is to be displayed online.
When a user wants to access this our aforementioned web content, they will use their browser to search for URL. Browsers read a URL as an IP address using the DNS, then locate the server where the information is stored, requesting to view this information. Using TCP/IP and HTTP protocols, the browser formats the information and builds a web document. The information in web document form is displayed as HTML, CSS, JavaScript which has been read by the browser to display content to the user. The time taken for information to pass from server to client is referred to as “latency”.
As the internet is pervasive in our daily lives, it is not often to consider the processes behind how information travels from servers to screens. For a visual insight into how web information is stored, check out this video on Google’s Data Centre.
