Where on the internet does a website live?

Any website, or page in a website, regardless if it’s a small blog that you found from searching for something online. Or if it’s a website from a large organization, like Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Live on a place in the internet called a web-server or simply called a server. Anything found online lives on an actual physical server, or a computer that gives something in response to a request for something. Like a page, or a picture, or a video requested from a web-browser click.

This web-blog lives on a physical server somewhere. And you can access or request pages from this website through a domain name (which in this case is “learnersjourney.net”). A domain name simplifies the process of finding things over the internet. Otherwise, without a domain name, you need to memorize a set or a string of numbers separated by dots, called an IP address (such as, 122.83.79.4). Each website has an IP address. Your own computer, when you browse and access this page over the internet, has an IP address of its own while connected to a service provider’s router and modem (ISPs, or internet service providers are normally telecom companies in the Philippines such as Globe, Converge, and PLDT).

Each device, a router, a modem, a smartphone, or a computer — as long as it is connected locally to a network, or when connected over the internet will have its own unique IP address. A website is no exception, because it has to live inside a machine or a computer called a server. And a server is connected to a network, which in this case, is the internet.

The internet or the web is vast network of computers, routers/modems, and other things.

And a website, or any app that runs online, lives on a physical server. Which is also a type of computer that runs all the time. Well, almost all the time. Servers can also go down, and from time to time — they do. Especially when it is time for maintenance, or when there are errors involving the codes they host. And other things, like incidents that prevent a server from working normally.

When servers go down, now-a-days, with proper solutions or server architecture, another server will spin-up and will materialize with the correct resources in order to take the place of a previous server that went down, or, that went offline.

In some cases, if a website is well in demand. Meaning, if vast numbers of page requests (traffic from the web) hopefully coming from actual people browsing the website’s pages would entail and require additional servers to spin-up and materialize in order to help take on the demand of increased traffic from people surfing the web. This is called, scaling up as the demand goes up.

Later on, to save on resource costs, as it costs money to keep servers running. Servers can begin to be decommissioned when the demand goes back down again. Scaling down to shrink the pool or number of servers running to meet the demand according to how it is at present time.

Okay. So, to do a recap.

Any website lives on an actual computer running some where, and it’s called a server. This server gives something in response to a request for something, some where else from the web, or from a network that it is a part of. This request can be from a computer user who is surfing the internet from his or her web browser that’s also connected to the internet. Like what you’re doing now, while reading this blog post.

Well, I guess that’s it about servers in a nut-shell, my friends.

Thank you, and I hope you have a fun time learning about stuff on the cloud, or about I.T. broadly speaking.

May God bless you.


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