How a Website Works
Think of building a website is like building a home. To build a home you need a plot of land to build your house on, a street address to locate your house and a building contractor to build your house.
To build a website you need a Host (Plot of Land), a web page designer (Building Contractor) and a street address to locate your home (Domain Name, www. example.com).
The Street Address of your website is its Domain Name (www.websitesname.com). Your Domain Name is required to be registered with a registrar which costs money. A domain name registrar is a company that handles the reservation of domain names and assigns IP addresses for those domain names. They are accredited by ICANN, a non-profit organization responsible for managing domain names. Domain names are alphanumeric aliases used to access websites, and registrars provide domain name registrations to the general public. It is important to note that domain names are owned by registries and can only be leased by users.
The Web site designer can be hired or if you are a savvy computer user there are many Template driven free and paid cloud-based website builder such as Wix, HostGator, GoDaddy, WordPress, Joomla, etc.
Hosting - The main elements of any web hosting plan are disk space and bandwidth. Disk space is the space you are given by the host on their web server to store your website. Bandwidth is an amount you have available to transfer web pages from the web server to the browsers of visitors to your site. Web pages and graphics consume bandwidth or capacity on the web. Bandwidth and disk space cost money.
The Highways - The network lines that carry data around the web (optic fiber, cable, copper wire etc) have a finite capacity, bandwidth. There is a limit to the amount of data that can be transferred at any point in time. Like roads and highways. A 6 lane highway can move more traffic than a two lane road. More bandwidth more data can be transferred and a faster rate.
Url - A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (HTTP/HTTPS) but are also used for file transfer (FTP), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.
Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar. A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html).
IP Address - An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two main functions: network interface identification and location addressing.
