Internet Basics

How it all fits together
The Internet is nothing more than a bunch of big computers (called servers) hooked together with high-speed communications lines. These servers contain the storage space that contain websites (like the hard disk of your PC contains your files), and are maintained by various companies. Some companies are big enough to have their own servers (like Yahoo, or AOL), but many smaller companies rent space on someone else’s server.

The companies providing this service are called hosting providers. Masterfolio.com, and the sites of our customers, are hosted by a company called One World Hosting, rated #1 hosting provider by CNET (one of the most reputable companies offering ratings on technology products and services).
To make sure these servers are running constantly, the hosting providers charge ‘rent’ for every site they host. That is why you are paying $18.95 per month – without it your site would simply disappear!

Domain names, website addresses and how to get around on the Internet To find a particular page, you need to have its address, or URL (unique record locator). All the pages of a website usually are grouped into a larger group called a domain. However, since there are billions of websites, a naming convention was established to ensure that enough addresses are available, and that is why there are multiple types of ‘domain levels’.

Websites belonging to government authorities end in ‘.gov’, while websites belonging to schools and universities usually end in ‘.edu.’ Non-profit organizations received the domain ‘.org’, while the ‘.com’ was designated for commercial applications, i.e. companies. Websites outside of the US also include yet another domain level, the country level. Thus Amazon’s website in Germany is www.amazon.com.de, the ‘de’ indicating that it’s based in Germany. Find out more about how to choose a domain.


What are browsers?
A browser is a software designed to read HTML, the markup language in which web pages are written, and to display it so that mortals like us can read it.

Currently, Microsoft Internet Explorer is the most-used browser, with Netscape Navigator a distant second. AOL is a service which also delivers Internet content in a browser window.

Since they were all developed separately, they all read HTML a little different and display it differently. Therefore sometimes a site can look different, based on which browser you use (not your concern, but it sure is a headache for those of us developing websites). We check that your site looks good no matter what browser your audience uses, so you don’t have to worry about it.

As we said, all this information is only here if you want to learn a bit more about how things work, but you don’t necessarily need it.


What are Search Engines?
A search engine is a type of software that continually surfs the internet, visiting millions of sites per day. It catalogues these sites based on keywords that it detects in the code of each website. That way, when you type in ‘resume’, the search engine will know how many sites relate to resumes and will display them for your selection.

The critical part of a search engine is how it chooses which sites to display, since for a search like ‘resume’, you might get over a million sites.

Google, one of the most popular search engines, for example, displays sites based on their popularity, which they determine by the number of links that point to that particular site.

Yahoo, on the other hand, actually employs people who constantly classify new websites and maintain a directory of sites, organized a bit like the Yellow Pages. Because this is labor intensive, you may not get as many search results as in Google, but because someone has actually looked at those sites and indexed them, they could be more relevant to your search (of course, the folks at Google would argue this to the end of time…)