It’s 2017 and time for our first Jargon Buster of the year, we know you all look forward to these blog posts!
After acquiring a new Server at the end of 2016 (taking our total up to 6 dedicated servers) we have decided to take the time to explain exactly what this means to all of our lovely readers.
A server, in its simplest form, is a computer that ‘serves’ other computers with information. Servers can be local, providing information to computers connected to a local network, or wider area networks that serve data over the internet.
Here’s where it gets slightly more complicated. There are lots of different types of servers that all carry out their own specific function. Web servers for example are used to host websites (we will talk more about hosting shortly) and mail servers, you guessed it, host email accounts.
We mentioned in the previous paragraph that servers can be used to host a website, but what does this mean? The easiest way to explain this is by using an analogy often used by Phil. Think of your website as a piece of real estate, before you build your home you will need to have a plot of land on which to build. Your hosting, or spot on the server, is this piece of land. When you build a house the larger the property you build the more land you will require, and it is the same for websites. Big websites are often hosted across multiple servers in different locations and in some cases different countries. This means when you type in the address of a website your computer will retrieve information from a server that is closest to your computer which should mean the data is transferred faster and the website loads quickly.
Last year we acquired a new web server in order to host our ever expanding portfolio of websites. We are very particular about the websites we host on our servers in order to ensure the safety of these sites only ever hosting websites we have built and allocating each site enough space on the server to grow.
If the New Year for you means thinking about a new website, contact us for more information on our web design services and our hosting packages.
We hope you enjoy our Jargon Buster series and it has cast some light on some of the more technical terms that might have left you scratching your head! If there is a topic we haven't covered or if you have a burning question for our new 'Ask the Expert' section why not let us know on Twitter or Facebook.