How Websites Work? - Introduction to Internet and Website in Tamil

Basics of Internet and Website. What is a website? What is an Internet? How they work?

Currently there are 330 million domains registered worldwide. 1.8 billion websites are hosted in 7.2 million computers. Internet occupies every field in the world. So we have to know the basic concept of Internet and website.

At first, two are more computers are connected together for file sharing purposes through network. This is achieved by a set of program rules called network protocol. ARPANET is a network protocol which is used first. Later, TCP / IP protocol was introduced. Then, all over the world uses this protocol to transfer files between them easily. TCP - Transmission Control Protocol. IP - Internet Protocol.

LAN - Local Area Network is a small network in a place where number of computers are connected through Ethernet cables.
WAN - Wide Area Network is a set of LAN networks connected together in a wide area.
WWW - World Wide Web is a connection of all networks combined together for public access all over the world.

Website - a set of files or folder which is given access worldwide. So anyone in the world can access those files or data directly throgh the IP address of the hosted computer.

We have many platform or languages in various devices. So common language is required for accessing a same file in all the devices. This is called HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. Browser in our device will display this kind of file. Anyone from any device can open this file from their browser. He can read the data in the page, navigate to next pages through the menu and download media, documents and all files.

Each website has a unique name. This is called domain name. Each page of a website has unique address or URL - Uniform Resource Locator. Where the folder is hosted is called hosting of website. We can buy a server or rent a server and pay monthly. So we pay for domain, hosting and development of the website.

If we enter a website, the request is sent to ISP - Internet Service Provider. Then the ISP resolve the domain name's IP address in DNS server. DNS - Domain Name System. Then the specific page in that particular IP address is opened in our browser.

The part after the domain in the URL is file path. In file path if we provide a filename after the folders, the particular file is opened in browser. Else, the default page of the folder will be opened. Mostly it's an index.html or index.php

HTTPS - HTTP connection with SSL. SSL - Secured Server Layer. This is an encryption layer for sending and receiving data from or to the clients. So if the client enter any secure information in our website. The data cannot be easily hacked while it sends to the server.

If we requested a web page, it will download all the required images, documents, css, js files to show the webpage. So we can't manage sensitive data in clientside. Thus we use server based programming. For example sign in sign up, ecommerce, dynamic websites, etc.

The sensitive and important data of a website is stored in a database which may be located in the same server or an individual server. The main server communicate to the database and sends the required information to the client. This is done by server side programming.