• Back to Articles
• Comments
• Share on Twitter
• Share on LinkedIn
• Email to a friend
• Subscribe to RSS
• May 19, 2010

The Unacknowledged Heroes

There are many people and organisations that have put in countless hours of hard work so that your website can load on someone else's computer. In this article we attempt to name a few.

Looking for the competition Tweet link? Tweet this!bit.ly/cZen69

Have you ever wondered how many different people and organisations are involved in bringing your website to a customer's computer screen? The following illustration might depict the average person's understanding of how the process works.

The Internet Service Provider (or ISP)

It all starts with the customer and their Internet Service Provider (ISP), who provides the customer with connectivity to the internet. The ISP has servers that control customer connections and the forwarding of data to and from the internet. Without the ISP and its staff, the customer would not be able to access anything on the internet.

When the customer types your website address into their address bar, the computer must seek more information before it can even connect to the website. This works much like a phone book: if you know someone's name you can't call them without their phone number. There are millions of these "phone book" computers all over the internet and they all share their information with each other in a somewhat complicated manner involving cache, expiries and a tree-like hierarchy. Without this system, your computer wouldn't know where to go when it wants to visit your website.

The International Cables

Our customers' websites are hosted in Australia. If your customer is overseas and wants to visit your site, chances are the data will pass through one of Australia's submarine cables that connects it to other continents. There are currently 6 of these cables, all managed by different organisations:

• The Southern Cross Cable (over 30,000km) connects Australia to the United States. Their network is designed so if any single segment is broken there will be an alternate path.
• The PIPE Pacific Cable (6,900km) connects Australia to Guam.
• The Telstra Endeavour (9,120km) connects Sydney to Hawaii.
• The Australia-Japan Cable (12,700km) connects Australia to Japan via Guam.
• The SEA-ME-WE 3, or South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3 (39,000km), connects Perth to 38 other landing points around the world.
• The JASURAUS (2,800km) connects Australia to Indonesia.

The Web Server

Next, the customer connects to your website's server. The server runs an operating system called Linux. Linux is a free operating system, commonly used in servers, and is the result of years of hard work from countless organisations. The Linux Kernel Mailing List, an email discussion about just one aspect of Linux, usually receives between 200 and 300 messages per day from developers. There are systems in place to keep track of code versions, bug tracking and much more.

The operating system on your website's server runs software called Apache, which is responsible for receiving the webpage request and sending the page back to the customer. Apache is also free software and is built and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Your website uses database software which was developed by MySQL AB, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems, which was recently acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Additionally, we use a scripting language called PHP which is developed and maintained by... wait for it... The PHP Group.

The code to gather all this information and layout your webpage is designed and written by a web developer (that's us!). The specifications for this code are dictated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Finally, the finished page is sent back to the customer and displayed in their web browser. Their web browser is also created by a team of developers.

Isn't it incredible that all these systems work in harmony, to the point where you can be almost certain a site will load when you type the address?

Other Organisations

There are many other people who make this possible:

• Hardware manufacturers
• Data centre staff
• Electricity providers
• Water providers (to run the data centre's cooling systems)
• Builders who build the data centres
• and many more, far too many to list

Still not impressed?

Every time a computer talks to another one, no matter what for, it follows a documented set of instructions that determine how they should communicate. Geniuses have thought of the instructions, button-pushers have documented them and super nerds have written code that implements them.

So next time you visit your website, log onto Facebook or watch a YouTube video, spare a moment to think about the many, many people who've made it possible.

Be nice to the nerd population. If you don't, we'll break your internet.