Clients and Servers - Ecommerce Hosting Relationships

A Home Business Article Contributed by Sharon Hill

The Ecommerce Hosting Relationship between Clients and Servers

All the hardware (computers) using the Internet (ecommerce) can be divided up into two categories - clients and servers (your ecommerce host.) The computers that need and use Internet services (like your home or business computer) are the clients. The computers that bring those services to you are the servers. Ecommerce hosting is done by the servers for the clients.

The Servers Ecommerce Hosting Tasks

There are actually three types of ecommerce hosting services that a server can provide. Web server services (getting the requested URLs to your computer after your request to view them) is the first job of the ecommerce host. The next is email. I guess we all know what that is. The third job your ecommerce host server does for you is called FTP. Short for File Transfer Protocol, the easiest way to explain it is that it is to documents and files what web server services are to URLs.

Your server, in its FTP capacity, goes out and gets the file you are requesting and displays it on your computer.

Defining Ip - Your Ecommerce Host's Way of Knowing Who You are

Your computer has its own unique identifier - sort of a social security number for computers. It's called IP, short for Internet Protocol. A 32 bit number, it is usually set up in 4 groups of numbers (each called octets because each group has numbers somewhere between zero and 255, 255 being the equivalent of 2 to the 8th power.) An IP might look like 213.85.34.1989.

Now, where this differs from identifiers like the social security number I mentioned is that you don't have the same IP number for more than one session of your computer - unless you are an ecommerce hosting server. Servers keep their IP. Clients' IPs are assigned each time they turn on their computer.

This is so that the server doesn't have to keep track of an infinite number of addresses, but can instead just assign as many as it needs to keep track of based on who is on and who it is working for at any given time. If you're using Windows the command you would use to find out what IP your server has currently assigned you is WINIPCFG EXE.

There is something that is easier to remember, and stays constant, that finds you on the Internet. This is your domain name. www.yahoo.com or www.cnn.com, for example. The www is the ecommerce host name. (of course, we all know that www means world wide web, but did you know that not all URLs need or have the www as their web address? They may in fact, eliminate it or use something else.

In the prior examples, www.yahoo.com and www.cnn.com Yahoo and CNN are the domain names. the .com is called the top-level domain name. Domain names are maintained by firms called registrars.