Your Port and Its Use by Your Ecommerce Hosting Server
A Home Business Article Contributed by Sharon Hill
Ports and How They Help Your Ecommerce Host
Anybody here a Star Trek fan? If so, remember docking bays? Well, that's what a port is - the path your ecommerce host server uses to let your computer talk to the Internet and the server. It's the door that lets them in and out from your system. Each function of the server - web service, email and FTP (File Transfer Protocol, for document and file/folder retrieval) will need its own port. Some functions have commonly used ports, though this isn't a must. The most common FTP port is 21; the most common web server port is 80.
Ecommerce Hosts and Protocols
Once you, the client, use your ecommerce host's server capabilities to connect to the needed service on a specific port, you will be using what is known as a protocol. The type of protocol you choose determines the way your system talks to the designated service. Quite often a protocol is text. One of the simplest, and most common ecommerce hosting protocols is the daytime protocol. Using this merely gives you the date and time. Most protocols, however, are more detailed that daytime.
HTTP is a protocol - it's the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The protocol sends one basic command to the server - the command is GET. Then, of course, the http is followed by the domain name part of the URL. So, the server understand the HTTP to be saying, "get this URL and send it back to the client."
When a page is displayed through your server's ecommerce hosting service it typically is using HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. What this means is that, instead of just displaying text on a page such as word processing or DOS systems, you will be seeing some nice formatting, with color, fonts, photos, headlines and graphics. Kind of like the difference, in print newspapers, between a line ad and a full color display.
The way that your computer knows to take the requested web address and show it as HTML language on your computer's screen is through the use of HTML tags. These are simple instructions for formatting, that tell the ecommerce hosting web browser how the page should like when it is displayed. The tags give the browser instructions about how arrange art or text into columns and what fonts and sizes of text to use. It's the web browser's job to assist the ecommerce host by interpreting these tag messages and creating the finished page.
Ecommerce Hosting and Your Web Browser
The two most common web browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape. A browser is a computer program that has two functions: to go to your ecommerce hosting server and request the page that you want, grab that page from the server and bring it back to your machine. The second job of the web browser is to interpret the HTML tags within the page in order to display the page on your computer as the page and site's designer meant it to be displayed.
