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Into the Internet & web hosting world, one word that you will always get to hear a lot of time is IP Addresses. Shared and Static are the two basic IP addresses which are normally used in hosting. To understand the difference between both the IP addresses you need to know the meaning of IP.

Whenever, you insert a website name in your browser – (www.example.com) that name is translated into some numbers (known as an IP address) and then the computer is headed towards that IP address which is the web site. All the web sites on the internet are established not by its domain name but by its IP address. IP addresses are in the format similar to 192.168.0.48, four discreet blocks separated by periods. You can reach a site by typing in the IP address alone and that will take you directly to the site.

For Ex: www.google.com resolves (turns into) 209.85.129.99. So if you type in 209.85.129.99 directly into your browsers address bar you will be redirected to the home page of this site.

Every web site on internet has an IP address provided to it. For example, every single website on this server does not use different IP addresses. If every site used a different IP address there could potentially be a problem with running out of IP addresses. (Fortunately this is not a problem and is going to be resolved when a new IP address standard is fully adopted).

There are so many sites that runs on one IP address on a server. For example: joeswebsite.com and maryswebsite.com both sites are using the same IP address. Using more than one IP address frees up IP address which are a limited resource. Basically what happens is that when joeswebsite.com is resolved into the IP address, the person looking for joeswebsite.com arrives at the server; the server then realizes that the person is looking for joeswebsite.com and sends that page to the person requesting it. The server basically steps in and does a millisecond of work and saves an IP address.

The use of multiple sites on an IP address is known as Sharing IP’s or a Shared IP address. A particular site having its own IP address, and doesn’t share with any site, it is know as Static IP address. You can always reach a site which has a static IP address by using its IP address alone, but you can’t reach a site using a shared IP address by typing in the IP address alone because when you type in a shared IP address you arrive at the server but the server doesn’t know which site you want because you haven’t told it which domain name you want. So looking at our example above, we typed in 209.85.129.99 and aimed at www.google.com, we know that only www.google.com uses this address as we can get to site without typing in a domain name and thus it must be a static IP address. However, do you know why you need a static IP address?

The main reason for having a static IP address is that you can use SSL encryption Certificate (the thing that makes e-commerce happen) only on a static IP address. In order for a person to transfer sensitive data over the internet at times, this data must be encrypted to prevent someone from intercepting the information. You can only use this encryption (called SSL Certificate) when the web site has its own IP address (static IP). It doesn’t work on a shared IP. So when a website takes in order with a person’s credit card it needs to encrypt this data and it uses SSL with its static IP.

Another cause for having a static IP address is that if a web site wishes to have anonymous ftp transfers (basically where anyone can download files off a site) the site needs to have a static IP address to handle the anonymous ftp transfer. Besides these two causes you don’t need to have your own IP address for a web site.

Hence, while choosing an IP address for your website doesn’t forget to consider these points.

Posted under Webhosting

Probably when, you come to a website to search a company that offers Web Hosting or Web servers services, do you really know how do these server’s work? Having a good knowledge of or about the service or product you are going to purchase is good for you.

The first thing you should know is that the machines that are responsible for storing the data and exchanging it to other machines are know as Web servers. For web server to work you always need two machines, one is client that requests the data and a web server that stores the data in it. Without software like Fire fox and Internet Explorer browser, one cannot negotiate with server to exchange the data.

For web server there are many options software available, which does the same work to request the data transfer in between the Clients and servers through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It depends on Operating System (OS) selected for the web server. For an example, UNIX fans choose Apache Web server, while Microsoft Internet Information Server is a popular choice for Windows NT.

Simple data trade between the client’s machine and a Web server works like this:

• The Client’s browser cut apart the URL into a number of separate parts, including address, path name and protocol.

• The domain name is translated by the Domain Name Server (DNS) into an IP address the user has entered in his browser.

• The browser detects which protocol (the language client machines use to communicate with servers) should be used. For Ex: Protocols used are File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

• The browser sends a GET request to the Web server to retrieve the address it has been given. For example, when a user types http://www.yourdomain.com/1.jpg, the browser sends a GET 1.jpg command to yourdomain.com and waits for a answer. The server responds on to the request of browser and verifies that the given web address exist, and finds the appropriate files, runs the proper scripts, exchanges cookies if required, and proceeds the results back to the browser. In case, if server is unable to locate the file, it sends an error message to the client.

• The browser translates the data it has been given in to HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and displays the results to the user.

This above process is repeated until the client browser leaves or closes the website. Apart from the functions mentioned above, the Web server also has an additional number of responsibilities. Whereas a Web browser simply translates and displays data it is fed, a Web server is responsible for distinguishing between various error and data types. A Web server must, for example, designate the proper code for any sort of internal error and send that back to the browser immediately after it occurs. It also has to distinguish between various elements on a Web page (such as .GIF, .JPEG and Audio files) so that the browser knows which files are saved in which format. Depending on the site’s function, a Web server may also have numerous additional tasks to handle, including logging statistics, handling security and encryption, serving images for other sites (for banners, pictures, etc), generating dynamic content, or managing e-commerce functions.

Now you have got an idea of a Web server, you should be pleased about all the process that goes in to delivering a single page of content to your computer screen. Keep this knowledge in mind when going to shop your another host.

Posted under Linux Hosting, Linux VPS Hosting, Webhosting