You open your browser, type the website address and press enter, then the site magically appears. But it’s not magical at all, in fact, it’s all logical. The internet is designed in such a way to make it easier for the user to navigate. However, in the backend, there’s so much going on that would overwhelm everyone that is not tech-savvy.
What Happens in the Back End When You Type an Address
First of all, let’s understand what an address really signifies for the internet. An address or domain is what we would consider an **apartment **is on a building. Like for example, www.templeoftech.net if it were an apartment it would get the apartment number 401. The real address of the domain we mentioned is something like 192.168.16.202 but that would be too long to remember and it’s complicated. That’s why we use the address instead of the numbers and that’s the same as the family name on the apartment. Apartment 401 is the same as 192.168.16.202, and the apartment family name such as Gabeci for example is the same as www.templeoftech.net.
Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash
To continue the analogy let’s think of the .net or the .com as the ‘building’ where all the ‘apartments’ that have that suffix stay. Okay, bear with me on this one it will make sense really soon. When you type the address on your browser a service automatically sends a request to find it. It first figures out in which DNS Rootserver it is, or as we called it the building. Then it searches the server for the address or searches the building for the apartment. This process is done through DNS Recursive Resolver or in our analogy this can be done by a mailman.
This mailman knows which building to look for since it is specified at the end of the address, and it goes there looking for apartment number 401. When it finds the apartment it requests the part of the website that you specified. If the place that you are searching for is still available then it returns it to your browser. This whole process repeats for every click that you do on a website but it’s so fast that you don’t even notice it, however, it goes through a lot of steps until it gets back to you.
#web #servers #domains #dns #internet