Web development is a pretty interesting field. It is the reason you are seeing web apps, and websites on your phone and laptop screens today. This means without it, you may not enjoy the internet. LOL. But you get what I mean.

On the first day, I learned about how the internet works. This is a topic we tend to skip when starting our careers in web development. But my tutor did a great job by explaining what happens under the hood. In this article, you will have a clear-cut understanding of how the internet works.

How the Internet works You may have probably heard that the internet is a network of networks. So many people like myself tend to just memorize that definition without understanding the concept. Don’t worry friend you will understand it in 3 seconds.

What is the Internet? The Internet as my tutor said is like a wire connecting from one computer to another computer. These computers are online 24/7. This is just what the phrase “network of networks” means See a diagram of the internet below;

So let’s take, for instance, you enter a web address such as google.com. It sends a message to your internet service providers (ISP). Internet service providers are those companies that give you the opportunity to connect to the internet such as GLO, MTN, Airtel, Sky, etc. The ISP communicates to the DNS servers.

DNS stands for Domain name system. It is used to identify computers that are reachable through the internet. DNS servers are more like a phonebook where IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are stored. Permit me to digress a bit. You will surely learn a thing or two.

There are certain numbers you see on the search bar whenever you search for something like this 192.158.1.38. Sounds familiar right? That is an example of an IP address.

Now, Imagine if you have to carry all the numbers of all the websites in your head. You would probably wear out. Lol. This brought about the invention of what we call domain name. Examples of domain names are facebook.com, amazon.com, iamdoziemoses.hashnode.dev, etc. You see that these ones are quite easy to remember. Read more about domain and hosting here

Sorry for the digression, but I am sure you learned something? Great! The IP address is then transferred to the client (local computer) which will transfer to the internet backbone. The internet backbone is the store of the computers that render the website files to you. You could say it is the core route of the internet. It is in the internet backbone you locate the web servers.

Think of web servers as a library that houses the websites you are searching for. The web servers will look for the website files and render them back to you. Whoop! That was a lot. You can see that a lot happens under the hood before seeing the results of what you are searching for. But, these processes happen in milliseconds. Read about how websites work

This is what I learned on day 1. I am sure you have gotten value in this article. If you want more of these articles, you could just bookmark my blog so you can access it easily. Stay glued. Till then.

Peace