What is Domain Name, URL, Web Page, Website, WWW, Web Hosting | TechTerms
Suppose you open your computer's browser,
type example.com in the top bar and hit enter. Some new contents appear on your computer
screen. When you click on the image, previous contents
disappear, and new contents appear and so on. The new contents that you see after every
single click are the visual representation of a document your browser has received from
a server in response to your request to access example.com. example.com is called domain name and the
document received is called a web page and is written in HTML language which browser
can understand.
The browser interprets the HTML document and
provides you with user-friendly contents on the screen. Note that all web pages are accessed and transported
with the help of HyperText Transfer Protocol or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, i.e. HTTP or HTTPS. Now, each web page has a unique address called
Uniform Resource Locator or URL containing: � HyperText Transfer Protocol or Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Secure � Fully qualified Domain name
� Directory, and � either Web page or nothing Here,
– 'www' is the machine name or host name and stands for the World Wide Web. It is mostly optional these days. – '55techterms' is the registered domain. – .com is the top-level domain
�55techterms.com� is the domain name, and we need to buy it from registrars like
GoDaddy, Hostgator, etc. Now, in the first URL, server is sending test.html
webpage to the browser, but if a URL does not end with extensions like .html, .php,
etc., the server loads a default file – index.html, index.php, etc. in that directory. For example, 55techterms.com/index.php and
55techterms.com open the same web page.
These URLs are linked with specific text or
images on the webpage to form hyperlinks. So, when you click on the image, hyperlink
redirects you to the link associated with it which results a new web page having new
contents. All publically accessible hyperlinked web
pages collectively form an information space called World Wide Web or simply Web. A collection of hyperlinked web pages sharing
a common domain name or FQDN is called a website.
So, a group of HTML files forms a website. To have our website visible on the Internet,
all files (HTML, CSS, text, images, videos, sounds) should be stored on special computers
called servers. For that, we need to buy some disk space on
the server from companies to which those servers belong. These companies are called Web Hosts � for
example, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc. Once the website files are uploaded successfully
on the server, it is the responsibility of web hosts to deliver the required files of
your website as soon as the server receives a request from a web browser. This service, provided by Web hosts, is called
Web Hosting. So, as a whole, on the internet, web hosts
provide us with servers to store hyperlinked web pages publically accessible with URLs
forming the World Wide Web. Web pages with common domain name collectively
form a website which goes live on the internet with the help of web hosting services.
