You read the intro but you are hungry for more, or you feel you do not have enough understanding for whatever you want to do, this time i will be more specific and make sure i include mostly practical usefull information.

So weather you took a peak on the history of the internet (using the link above), more important details on the internet today are very usefull information yet to come.

Lets start by loosely defining some terms and concepts that will help you understand the internet, Datacenters are the first, a datacenter is a Geographic location with a fast connection to the internet, within that location, Computers (HOSTS) are connected via a Local Area Network (LAN).

This datacenter owners buys IP addresses and assigns them to the computers (at least one IP for each computer), Now the computer is connected to the internet hardware wise, but it is still not officially an internet server, in order for it to serve pages or files, it needs sets of software, Most importantly a capable operating system, and a web server (in addition to hardware drivers and other essential software), The operating system will initialize a connection (with the help of other tools) and the server software will start accepting requests and reply to them with appropriate content

It is ok if you do not understand yet, you will start forming the clear picture very soon

Examples of operating systems are Windows, UNIX, FreeBSD (Unix like), LINUX (Also Unix Like), Linux is the operating system most widely used for internet servers, and it is also my operating system of choice, Why ? For 2 simple reasons, my experience has provide it the best operating system for the job (and other jobs) You can download a distribution of Linux and run it on your home computer if you like (Also has some nice computer games), And second reason would be that it is free, the first reason alone is good enough !

As for web servers Xitami and Apache are examples, i personally use Apache, and it is also the most popular and most widely used HTTP server. You will need other servers installed for other things, for example you will need an FTP server for FTP and an IRC server if you wish to run Internet Relay Chat server on your server, a good FTP server is ProFTPd.

So lets get to business with this scenario

You call a datacenter and ask them for a machine at the datacenter, you can specify the hardware of the machine and the deal you want, Now you have a computer running the operating system you demanded, and a server, The server is set to serve pages from a certain directory in your system.

Your machine should have an IP address ! if you go to that specific directory and upload a page called index.html, then type the IP address of your server in the address bar of a browser, you should see the contents of index.htm, but you wouldn't want to refer your visitors to a number would you ? then you would probably want to buy a domain name, this domain name works as an alias for the IP address of your server.

So you go to (A domain name reseller) and get a domain name, you will then want to point that address to your server, there are many ways to do this, on of which is to specify the ip address of your server, another is called pointing to a nameserver, the second method is the method of choice because it has many advantages you will see later.
You will need to assign two name servers to that domain, for example ns1.buildguide.net , ns2.buildguide.net, the name servers you should point your domain to is not arbitrary, Your hosting or server provider should give you the address of the name server to point your domains to (unless you host your own DNS server), a nameserver is really just another alias for an IP address.

After the setup is done, visiting the domain name you purchased should show you the same result as typing in your ip address, Yet you should note that it could take up to 48 hours for your domain name to propagate through the internet and this to work.

So at the minute you are done, if you build a website and upload it to that directory, you should be able to see it on the internet !

But wait, i want another website, do i have to get another computer to host it ? Not really, you probably didn't need an entire computer to host the first one in the first place, but lets just say you already got one, and you need a second website, or maybe you want to give marry a website to sell her brownies on !

This is where the capabilities of the server software kick in ! Apache for example allows you to specify a VirtualHost, what is that you may ask, A virtual host is simply a way to host many websites on the same server, When the server (apache in this case) gets a request by visiting a domain in its virtual hosts list, it knows what directory holds that website.

So probably by now you know a great deal about how things work... But an important piece of information that the above scenario probably does not fit you, It is just too expensive a way to get a website online, whet you need is an account on a server and getting your virtual hosting, usually called shared hosting (You share a server with many other users and hence the name).

When you sign up for a shared hosting account you will be given a directory on a server to store your website on, and that directory will have the files accessible above your domain, in the same way buildguide.net is hosted on the info2device server

Now that you have a pretty good idea on how things work you may want to proceed to Why do you or don't you need a website, or if you already know that you do need a website and insist on not reading that very inspiring section, you can proceed to The Tools you need.