Behind the Webpage: What’s behind the webpage and how it affects your everyday life.

Behind the Webpage: What’s behind the webpage and how it affects your everyday life.Todd MixFollow5 min read·Jul 9, 2019 --

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The mysterious Internet. The cloud. Email. Social Media. All these things that just somehow work, that somehow store our data, and other’s data, that give us all the answers to any question

we could possibly think to ask. Ask any question and it seems like someone has written about it.

Need anything, and you can buy it on the internet. Looking for the news, and you can find it on the internet. Wonder how your friends are, and you can look up their social media page on the

internet. Need an education, get a degree on the internet. Seeking a relationship, you can find it on the internet. The web we browse is in every aspect of our lives. But what is actually

behind the things we see on our web browser of choice. What’s behind the webpage?

Ultimately, what’s behind the webpage can be broken up into 2 different parts, hardware and software

Hardware

The hardware behind the webpage is the basic infrastructure of the internet. Began originally as an Army-funded project to disperse information called the ARPANET, It has grown through

public and private means to reach into almost every home and business in the United States. For most Americans, the internet is a daily part of your life, being the infrastructure behind

services like email, the cloud, and the world wide web.

The internet, at it’s most basic, is a public network of connected computers. An awfully big one. In 2018, there were 17 billion devices connected to the internet, more than double the

population of the earth.

It starts in your home, or wherever and however you connect to the internet, whether through WIFI, or a cable, your connection to the internet first goes through a modem. A modem is a device

that translates information in a way so that your personal device can connect to other devices through the internet.

From there, routers are used to help information get to the correct places. Routers are computers whose sole purpose is to connect the internet altogether and pass on the information to the

correct places, whether that is the end destination, or passing it on to another router to be passed yet again.

Another tool to help us humans use the internet is known as DNS, or Domain name system. DNS is like the phonebook of the internet. Humans and computers speak in totally different languages,

and DNS is used to mitigate that difference. Humans speak in names, using letters and such, while computers speak only in numbers. DNS simply translates names, such as google.com, to the

corresponding IP address, which is how computer identify other computers, such as the corresponding address for google.com, 172.217.11.174. Routers use the information DNS gives them to

connect you to the right place.

HowStuffWorks Webservers serve as the main workhorses of the web, housing and transmitting most of the websites that you use. They are computers based on the same essential parts of your

everyday desktop computer or laptop but normally stripped down to the minimum requirements in order to maximize computational efficiency for the task appointed it. These webservers receive

your request for a certain webpage and send back the necessary data for your web browser to create it.

However, most organizations webservers are protected by reverse proxy servers. These servers serve as a go-between the public internet and the webservers with the important data. When your

computer is connecting to a server, most often it is not connecting to the actual server, but to the reverse proxy in front of the server.

This reverse proxy takes the clients request and passes it on to the proper webserver within a private network it is connected too, then transmits the webservers reply back to the requesting

client. This protects data and process on the webserver by never allowing the public direct access to it. It is also the most vulnerable part of a system to a few types of cyber attacks,

the most common being a DDOS attack.

A DDOS attack, or denial of service attack, simply overwhelms one or many reverse proxy servers with some many requests it can’t keep up, sometimes as many as in the millions per minute.

This means that anyone trying to access the site will be unable to do so. While this attack doesn’t give hackers any sort of confidential or sensitive information, DDOS attacks often happen

against companies that have upset the hacker community at large.

Firewalls also protect webservers and your personal computer, by only allowing certain IP address and types of connections to the computer. This is also how countries like China censure

internet access to the country, by using a firewall to block any IP address that’s not wanted from communicating inside the country.

Software

The software, or computer code, of your webpage is the other part of what’s behind your webpage. The webservers that you connect to through the infrastructure of the internet, transmit back

the source code for each of your webpages, which your web browsers then translates into what you actually see on the screen. Google and other search engines also use it to create the search

results based on your search. First, let’s have you take a look at the source code of this webpage.

Hit CTRL + u.

Now you are looking at the source code for this webpage. This is the information that your computer actually receives from the webserver you connect to and is then translated by your web

browser into what you see on the page. This most likely looks really confusing. Don’t worry, because it is. This page is not formatted in a way that’s made for humans to be able to read and

has a lot of information on it that isn’t too useful for us.

Another way to see the information in a more human friendly way, and even alter (but just on your web browser) the source code, is to look at the information by hitting CTRL+SHIFT+C

This panel is slightly more useful for the everyday user who is simply curious. As you scroll over the webpage it highlights for you what part of the source code corresponds to what you see

on the screen. This helps you see how your browser interprets the source code that the webserver is sending.

If you go into the console section of the panel you can even run JavaScript commands to alter the code, but only on your web browser and only until you reload the proper source code from the

actual webserver. You can learn more about that here.

Today’s internet

Today’s internet is a central part of the economy and almost every American’s everyday life. The internet is a complicated network, and keeping it properly up and running along with

improving its hardware and software, is a full-time job for millions around the world. How and how well it works effects all of us every time we open our web browser. It affects how we work

and how we play. How we spend our time and who we spend it with. The internet is a big place, and what’s behind the webpage matters!