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Canadian Computer Consulting
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For simple websites, many people choose to do the website design themselves, but the domain name registration and the web hosting can only be done economically "in-house" by extremely large corporations. Why it's not economical to do it yourself: If your own company wanted to host its own website, it would first have to buy a server and set it up. Then it would have to buy its own IP address, and pay for a super-fast internet connection, and a place to physically keep the server. If taken to the extremes, to have absolutely everything under your own control, it could potentially cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to run your own website. Obviously that would be a silly thing to do unless you were a multi-billion-dollar corporation and had a use for it. Let's say, for example, that your office wants another phone line. Would you go out and buy a bunch of wire and run lines down the street to each of your customers? Of course not. You would simply call the local phone company, who already has the phone lines set up on telephone poles ready to use, and they would let you use theirs for a monthly fee. The only reason to buy the raw materials, wires, and machines would be if you were going to start your own telephone company! Such it is with the internet. Web Hosting providers (such as Canadian Computer Consulting) have paid in advance to purchase all the materials, machines, and tools for hosting websites. We have set up our own "telephone company", but could never use that many "phone lines" just for ourselves. So we lease them to other people. Just like one phone line can carry hundreds of conversations, one server setup can easily host hundreds of websites at a time. So that's what we do. For a very small fraction of the cost of setting up and keeping your own website online, we can "host" it for you. What that means, specifically, is we give you space on our server to store the files needed for your website, and we give you a fast internet connection for your website to use so that people can access it quickly and easily. If you like, we will also take care of all the details of arranging the domain name and settings. Please note that typically it would be up to you to design the website itself, and make ongoing changes to it. Designing and modifying a website is usually done using an editor (like Microsoft FrontPage) that is VERY similar in use to a word processor such as Microsoft Word. A two-hour lesson is usually all it would take to explain the basics of designing and maintaining your own website, and we would give you a username and password that you would use in order to have access to modify your website. If you would like us to make changes for you, we would be happy to do so, but it would not be included in a monthly fee, but rather on a fee-per-change basis. Want more information? Let's start at the beginning, with a look at how the internet works. Every house in a city has a street address. And each street address belongs to the people that live there, for as long as they own the house and continue to pay their taxes. If someone who's never visited your house before wants to visit you, there's a series of steps they would generally have to go through to get there. They would probably look up your name in the phone book and find your address. Then they'd look at a map and find out how to get there. Then they'd get in their car or on the bus, and (assuming your house hasn't physically moved) they would be able to find you. Well, visiting a website is very much the same process, but most of the work is done automatically by your computer. All you usually need to know to visit a website is the "name" of that website. For example, the name of this website is www.ComputerConsulting.ca. You type that into your browser, and you arrive more or less instantly. But a lot goes on behind the scenes to get you there! When you decided to visit this web page, you told your computer to visit "www.computerconsulting.ca". Or maybe you clicked on a link to get here, in which case the link told your computer to visit "www.computerconsulting.ca". Either way, your computer then contacts your Internet Service Provider (ISP) (Shaw, Telus, etc) and asks for directions on how to find that site. There are several website directories in the world (called "registries") that keep a listing of every website name registered in the world. Each year, Canadian Computer Consulting Corp pays a fee to these registries to maintain the rights to use our "domain name" (computerconsulting.ca) and to have our website listed in this directory. Your Internet Service Provider will contact the registry and ask for directions to the website. When we registered our domain name, we told the registry what our "IP address" is. In the case of computerconsulting.ca, our IP address is "24.85.92.140". Every computer and every website in the world that is connected to the internet has its own, unique, IP address. So when your ISP contacts the registry, and asks how to find "computerconsulting.ca", the registry replies back with 24.85.92.140. This is an over-simplification of the process, but that's the basic idea. So how does your computer find 24.85.92.140? Well, there's ANOTHER registry out there that keeps track of what company owns each "block" of IP addresses. For example, there might be only one company in the world that owns every IP address that starts with "24.". That company in turn might lease out to a second company every address that starts with "24.85", and so on. Because Canadian Computer Consulting is a relatively small company, we could never afford to pay the billions of dollars required to own an entire block of IP addresses, but nor would we have any need to. Instead, for this one website, we only needed to lease one IP address. Your computer asks each registry of IP addresses in turn until it finds out exactly who "owns" the IP address for computerconsulting.ca and then your computer connects directly to this website. So where, physically, is the website? Does it just sort of exist, eternally, in "cyberspace"? And what exactly is "cyberspace"? Well, the "Internet", as we know it, doesn't really exist at all as a single entity. If you have two computers in your house that are connected by a cable, then you have, in fact, a miniature version of the Internet running in your own house. The Internet is simply billions of computers around the world that are all connected together with wires, radio waves, and satellites. When you connect to computerconsulting.ca your computer is actually connecting to our "server", which sends back whatever website or web page you asked to see. So, now, what exactly is a "server"? A server is a computer, typically a very fast one, that is setup specifically to give out information to other computers. When you use your own computer at home, obviously if you're sitting in front of the keyboard and typing then no-one else can use your computer at the same time as you. A server is setup to get around this problem. While you're looking at this website and reading this text, dozens of other people around the world could be looking at this website at the same time. Because each person has their own computer, the server can be used by many people at a time. Since you're reading this text, you're actually using our server too, right this very second. So one of the reasons a server has to be very fast is to serve many people (or computers) at a time. A server also should be dedicated to what it's doing. If I walked up to our server and hit the power switch to turn it off, you wouldn't be able to visit this website anymore. While "surfing the net" you've probably seen error messages similar to "server not found" or "page not found". While there could be many reasons for receiving these errors, it could be something as simple as someone hit the power switch on the server. As soon as the server stops working, every website on it instantly goes offline. When you visited this website, you probably had to wait a few seconds (or more if you're on a really slow internet connection such as dial-up) for this page to display. Now try opening 10 copies of this page at exactly the same time. It will probably take about 10 times longer for each page to load, because your internet connection is trying to transfer 10 times more information at the same time. As we explained earlier, it is possible, and even likely, that more than one person is accessing this same web page as you, right this very second. If there are 10 people accessing this website at the same time, then either we have to have an internet connection to our server that is at least 10 times faster than normal, or each person who's trying to see this page will have to wait 10 times longer. As we're trying to put out a professional image about our company, and we want people to visit our website, we don't want to make them wait 10 times longer than normal to see this page. Therefore our server has to have a VERY fast connection to the internet. Remember we told you that each computer on the internet has its own "IP address"? Well, that's true. But not all computers are connected to the internet at all times. So if you're an ISP (like Shaw or Telus), you might have 10,000 customers, but on average there are only 5000 connected to the internet at any given time. So why pay for 10,000 IP addresses, when you could get away with 5000? So here's what your ISP does. When you first turn on your computer it sends out a message to your ISP asking for an IP address. Your ISP will then find one that isn't being used and give it to your computer to use for as long as it's connected to the Internet. When you turn your computer off again, your ISP will give that IP address to someone else. But remember we told you that when you visit a website your computer has to know what IP address to connect to! If it kept changing every few days, the registry wouldn't be able to keep up. Therefore, servers need to use what are called "static IPs". In other words, Canadian Computer Consulting Corp has to pay for the right to least one particular IP address that won't change each time we re-start our server. That way, when your computer contacts the registry to find out where our website is, the registry will know what IP address to send you to. Note: I started off this page to be a one-paragraph explanation of what "web hosting" is, but felt more explanation was necessary. And all of the above is a massive over-simplification of the concepts involved. So if you have any questions about anything you've read, or want more information, please let me know! |
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Vancouver: 604-249-4486 Victoria: 250-412-1593
Edmonton: 780-701-7167
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