INFOTECH PRIVATE LIMITED

Kota's First Internet Service Provider

What is Web

Webs? What are we, spiders? Well, sort of. Browsing the World Wide Web can snag you lots of information, more than you might expect. Plus, with your own Web site, you can get folks' attention from virtually anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day.

You don't have to know much about the "Web," or how it works, to browse fairly successfully. But if you're planning to create a Web "site," you might find it less daunting if you understand what you're dealing with.

With your own Web site, anyone with Web browser software and a connection to the Internet can find the Web pages you publish. Your site can be an advertisement for you or your organization. It can be an on-line newsletter, a catalog of goods or services, a customer support vehicle, or an employee or sales management system for remote offices. Think of what you're doing via brochures, catalogs, faxes, and forms, and chances are you can do a lot of it more efficiently over the Internet, and the World Wide Web, in particular. But what's the Web? Read on.

The "Web"

So we've got our Internet "superhighway. " Before the World Wide Web was launched, you could ship some fairly nuts-and-bolts text messages and files over it, in a hard-to-use fashion. But imagine the Web as a new service arriving at your door, promising to deliver not just text, but pretty documents with headlines, graphics, sound, video, and click-on links to other documents and sites.

Picture the new WWW service running in special trucks over the same Internet as the nuts-and-bolts stuff. But the new fancy stuff comes out of special warehouses, right to your door. That special service is the World Wide Web. And the special fancy document warehouses are Web server computers, which handle the special requirements of the new service. Your door, of course, is your Web browser software.

Like the Internet, private enterprise didn't play a big part in the creation of the World Wide Web. The Web came out of research begun in 1980 at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory) by Tim Berners-Lee. (Lee programmed the first "Web" software on Steve Job's NextStep operating system, on a Next UNIX cube.)

By the early '90s, the World Wide Web was poised. Several UNIX browsers were kicking around when Marc Andreessen of the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne) developed an easy-to-use browser for X-Windows, and then Microsoft Windows in 1993. Andreessen left NCSA and started his own browser company, Netscape Communications. The commercialization of the "Web" started in 1994, when only about 1,500 sites existed worldwide.

Browsing vs. building

What's the difference between browsing a Web site and setting up one of your own? To browse a site, you first have to connect your computer to the Internet. Unless you want to pay a $1,000 or more a month to wire your home or office computers directly to the Internet, you'll generally use someone else's direct, high-speed Internet connection. That "someone else" is an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP pays the big bucks to have computers sitting right on the Internet. To get from your home or office to the ISP, you use telephone lines and a modem. When you want to browse, or check your e-mail, you dial in—modem to modem—to your ISP. It connects you to the Internet and its Web service and also offers e-mail service.

Once you're patched into the Internet—via your ISP—you start running your Web browser software. Browser software understands the language of World Wide Web traffic running on the Internet. It understands the rules that govern Web-service traffic, known as the "transport" rules, or protocols.

In browsing, you've noticed that each Web page has an address, listed as something like "http://www.netobjects.com." Ever wonder what "http" stands for? It means Hyper Text Transport Protocol. Placed at the beginning of the address, HTTP is saying "I want to make a Web-based connection over the Internet, to the following address. Handle the data transportation issues for me." The rest of the address is called a Universal Resource Locator, or URL. Every page on the Internet can be reached by a specific URL. It's a pointer to a specific page, just like your street address is a pointer to where you live or work.

What's a Web page, really?

Sure, you've looked at Web pages. But what are they, under the hood, so to speak? For a clue, the next time you're browsing a Web site, click the View/Source in your browser. A window pops up with a bunch of funny looking text marked off between bracket characters (< and >, see the illustration). These codes are the basic language of Web pages, known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Your browser follows the coded instructions to display fancy-looking pages and to perform all the hyperlink jumps to other pages and sites.

ISP "Web hosting"

Getting your own Web site means creating Web pages and putting them where folks can find them over the Internet. Unlike browsing, your Web pages can't sit on your home or office computer, unless those are wired directly to the Internet. A modem connection from an ISP to Web pages on the computer just won't do the job. You'll need to rent disk space on your ISP's Web server computer. As we described above, a Web server is like a warehouse of Web pages sitting right on the Internet, ready to hop on and travel to whomever needs them, courtesy of the HTTP service. That means that as long as the Web server is up and running, anyone in the world, practically, can visit those pages.

If you're already paying for an Internet connection, your ISP can usually provide some Web server space. Many ISPs actually provide their e-mail customers with free Web server space for noncommercial Web pages—mine gives me 10MB.

Of course, the free route doesn't get you a very snazzy Web site address. To get to my humble, self-promotional site, for example, you have to browse . If I wanted something like http://www.bobweibel.com, I'd have to spend about $160 to set up the site and to register the bobweibel.com "domain name", plus $40 a month for Internet service, instead of just $10, and an addition $35 a year to keep "bobweibel.com" registered.

Also, as your site and the traffic to and from it grows, the fee you'll pay someone for hosting your site will grow. Web server providers look at the total amount of data going to and from your site—the "bandwidth, " in tech talk. And they look at the amount of server disk space you use. The more you use, the more you'll pay.

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Kappa Infotech Private Limited

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Head Office : 342-B, Shopping Centre, KOTA (Rajasthan) India.

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