Understanding Your Small Business Web Host

A Home Business Article Contributed by Sharon Hill

If You Don't Understand the Internet, You Won't Understand Small Business Web Hosting

So, let's start at the beginning - and, before you set out to look for a web host for your small business, tell you all about the Internet and how it works.

The Internet is the largest collection of folks, the most massive communication vehicle ever. What's even more unique is that it is not a sole proprietorship, partnership or corporation. It has no owner. It is a tremendous collection of networks large and small, personal and business, hosts and clients, that form the one entity we call the Internet, or the world wide web. The name Internet is an abbreviated derivation of the two words interconnected network.

Before Small Business Web Hosting

The Internet was first created in 1969. Back then small business web hosting was not even a dream - in fact the Internet was primarily a military use product.

Every computer that is used to get online is part of the Internet network. You use a modem to connect to your Internet Service Provider (ISP.) Your small business or your employer is probably part of a LAN group (local area network) which connects all the firms computer to each other. But they still need an ISP to communicate with the small or large business host and the world wide web. The Internet, simply put, is a network of networks, ever expanding outward.

Large companies have several local area networks that talk to each other through Points of Presence and Network Access Points. Points of Presence is the place where these local users make contact with the company's network through a T-1 or other communication line. The places where the networks gather to communicate with each other are the Network Access Points.

Two other resources for successful Internet networking are backbones and routers. Routers are, as their name suggests, the hardware that find the communication route for the message you and others send from one computer and another. They find the path for your computer's message. They also have a second task - to make sure that when delivering the message, other un-requested information from the delivering or receiving computer does not make its way to the other computer.

Setting the Scene for Small and Large Web Hosting Business

In 1987 the National Science Foundation designed the first high speed backbone - 1 T-1 line that collected 170 smaller networks. Three firms - Merit, IBM and MCI were partners in this project. One year later the same companies upgraded this backbone with a T-3 line. Now there are numerous firms that have their own high speed backbone.

Most backbones are still fiber optic lines, or rather a joining of multiple fiber optic lines whose partnership speeds up the Internet communication delivery process. To give you some idea of just how fast these backbones are, let's compare them with a 56k modem. 56k translates to communication delivery of 56, 000 bps (bits per second). Fiber optic lines, designated as OC lines (optical carrier, offer various speed levels.

OC-3 transmits 155 mbps (3 times the 56k) while the fastest, OC-48, delivers 2488 mbps.