Ask Steve

So I type in www.alveus.com how is it that my computer knows how to find it?

Domain names are purchased from a company like www.dotmaniac.com or www.godaddy.com. These names are then registered with an international organization called Internic. Internic oversees a world full of computers that all talk to each other and knows who owns the domain name and where to go to find it. Every domain name corresponds in to a number called an IP address. These IP addresses are the actual location of the server where the web site is stored. Think of it as a house address. You have a name and you live somewhere in order to find the person with your name we must go to your address and then ask for you.
Every web site is “hosted” on a server. The term hosted refers to the physical location of where the actual information that makes up the web site is on a computers hard drive. As we stated before this kind of computer is called a ‘server’. Internet Service Providers, usually referred to as an ISP, of all sizes offer “hosting” of web sites. This allows their customers to save the HTML code on the ISP’s server hard drive. Servers are online 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. So if you host a web site with a company like this your web site can be seen by anyone anywhere in the world anytime.
Whether by domain name or IP address the complete address is called a URL.URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. In other words the URL, in always the same way, sends a request out to the whole world of the internet and because all URL’s follow the same set of rule they will always brings back whatever you told them to go get. This URL has information in it works much like your mailing address. Just as your mail goes to a specific state, then city, then zip code and finally to your street and your house the IP address that supports the domain name has this same information on it and is shared with servers know as Domain Name Servers (DNS). These DNS servers tell the world all the URLs that should come to it then when any request for any of those goes to any other DNS server it knows to send to that specific one. Just like the mail man knows to send it to your city or state. From there the DNS server and send it to the server the web site is on and finally that server can send back the specific information you requested (the web page)

That is an amazing amount of work in just a few seconds huh!