What is a Website?

What is a website.

A website is a single or a collection of web pages that share a single domain name.

A website typically requires three components domain name, a server and information.

A domain name is the address for the website. Domain names have two parts which are separated by a full stop. For example google.com. The first part of the name can be made up of letters, numbers and symbols. The second part is the TLD Top Level Domain there are only a limited number of these although many more have been made available in recent years, for example .gov is for government agencies, .edu is for educational institutions and .ca is for Canada etc .Behind every domain name is a IP address. Every web server requires a Domain Name System DNS to translate domain names into IP addresses, this is done behind the scenes as to make web surfing as easy as possible.

A server in it's most basic form is a internet connected computer which stores the website information and make it available to the public or authorised users. The most common type is a client server system identified with request response model, a client sends a request to the server the server performs some action and sends a response back to the customer. A server is more powerful and much more reliable than personal computers usually they are massive computing clusters in purpose built data centres.

A website can carry all manner of information written pictures video multimedia data online calculations, booking forms, banking etc etc.

The World Wide Web was invented in 1990 by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee. April 1993 it was announced the world wide web would be free to use. The first website was published 6th of August 1991 in Switzerland. The number of websites is expanding at an amazing rate in 2012 there were 654 million website there are more than one billion. It is estimated that the world wide web uses 2.2% of the world's electricity resources.