Communication between a web server and a server, between a server and other devices, play an important role in web hosting or any kind of function that happens technically among devices. It is similar to how our human brain works with other parts of the body. If one node of communication fails from the human brain, the part that it stops communicating will not work or be damaged.
Not many of us know how these servers work and how they communicate with each other. If you type the URL of your website in the address bar of your Internet browser, such as Chrome, Safari, your computer transfers information to the server hosting to pull the website data onto the screen of your device.
Let us see how servers connect to the Internet in the following section.
Splitting of The URL
The first step in this communication process is your browser splits the URL into three parts—HTTP, server name or the IP address in other words and the file name such as .html, which relates to files such as images, computer-style sheets such as CSS, fonts and more of a specific website.
Connecting web server IP Address
The server name is converted into an IP address, the language which a web server can understand, and with the IP address is how a browser is inter-linked to a web server. Thus, your browser connects to the server at that particular translated IP address. You need to remember that the IP address assigned by your Internet service provider (ISP) keeps changing every time you log onto the server or any URL for that case, but the server’s IP address will never change. Thus the browser assigns a specific code to the web server’s IP address and tries to connect to it every time using the same #html code.
After you connect your computer to the web server, the browser that you use sends a request to access a file that is linked to your server. This file is a kind of web page that has already been included in your website URL and when you type the URL in the browser’s address bar, it directly connects to the webserver and fetches the required information on your computer, laptop or mobile screen.
Data Conversion
Later, whatever the information that you expect from the webserver to connect, all the HTML files or text of the web page are sent by the server to your computer’s browser and further, the server converts the HTML data into a web page and pops up on your screen. To the wonder, all these processes happen within a fraction of seconds between the server and the computer.
Until now, we learned about the server to computer information translation, whereas now we will look into the server–server translation.
Communication Between Two web server
Communication between one server to another server is required if the information stored on both the servers are similar. Otherwise, both the servers operate independently upon the instructions from the URL keyed in by the user.
We have artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) embedded with cloud infrastructure to initiate communication between two devices. But servers are not physically seen technology and hence, it takes the help of IP address to collaborate with internal computers and several cloud-based platforms to translate from one server to another server.
For example, if you have two servers Server A and Server B and have hosted two websites in each server, respectively, and one particular web page in the website that belongs to Server A has been linked with some page of the website that belongs to Server B, then both the servers follow this pattern: You type the URL of the Server A in one browser and go to the link that takes you to the Server B. Click on the reference link, and now your browser communicates with Server A to fetch the web page linked to the Server B and finally, displays the web page associated with the Server B. The same process is repeated with Server B in case it has a reference link associated to the Server A.
If there are broken links or URLs, any server for that case fails to communicate and translate the required information on your screen. Your web hosting service provider offers you support for two IP addresses—IPv4 and IPv6. In case the non-static one IPv4 fails to fetch the information from the server, the static one IPv6 will support at that point.
Conclusion: Server communication happens faster than communication among devices. Learning about server translation will definitely help you understand if something goes wrong with your server or if the URL opens as a broken link. This will allow you to resolve the problem immediately either independently or with the support of your web hosting service provider.
Ashok Arora is CEO and Founder of eWebGuru a leading web hosting company of India. He is a tech enthusiast with more than 25 years of experience in Internet and Technology.
Ashok is Master in Electronics from a leading Indian university.
Ashok loves to write on cloud, servers, datacenter, virtualisation technology.
