Work at Home Internet Marketing Business

The phrase in the title does not, unfortunately for most of us, refer to a butler who brings coffee to your desk in the morning. It refers to a computer in the office that has a few special tasks to perform on behalf of others. So, perhaps in a different way it’s a little like a butler.

You could store all your files, emails, photos and more on your own computer. You could use only your computer for access to the Internet, printing, faxing and more. But that setup has some potential downsides, especially when your office grows to hold multiple desktops.

If your personal machine goes south, you could be out of business (at least for a while). Even if your machine doesn’t completely crash and burn, you could still be in serious trouble just by losing one file. You could make backups locally, say on a USB flash drive. But storing and using those small devices could lead to complicated and duplicate effort if your office has multiple computers.

If your machine is directly connected to a DSL, cable or satellite modem anyone else on your office network accessing the Internet has to go through your machine to get to the web. That drags down the performance of your machine while you’re using it, and slows down Internet access for the others.

All these problems and more can be solved by investing in a single computer that performs services on behalf of others. That’s the role of an office server. It centralizes your local email system, so everyone can take advantage of it without slowing down anyone else. It gives you a place to attach a printer, network fax machine and more so that everyone can use them without slowing down or relying on anyone else. Most importantly, it gives you a central storehouse for file backups and - heaven forbid - restores, if and when they’re needed.

With the enormous hard drives available on even ordinary computers today, servers are no longer critical for housing raw space. But their role is still important. They provide a convenient place to centralize documents, images and more that is accessible by every computer on the network with the security rights to get to them.

The alternative is what’s known as a peer-to-peer system, in which all machines on the network are equal. The Internet and all the personal computers that use it are somewhat like that (although, it also uses millions of servers).

For example, you may store your email, files and more on Google, which acts like a central server for you. Or, you may just pass files back and forth with other users, each one acting as a peer to the other. That method has its benefits and drawbacks as well. But for those who maintain an office of anywhere from two to two thousand computers a central server provides numerous values. You gain reliability, security and performance benefits from having a central system that does work on behalf of others in the office.

Now if you could only train one to bring coffee in the morning…

Among the more useful innovations in computing, actually invented decades ago, are the twin ideas of redundancy and failover. These fancy words name very common sense concepts. When one computer (or part) fails, switch to another. Doing that seamlessly and quickly versus slowly with disruption defines one difference between good hosting and bad.
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Things To Think About

You can often get a substantial discount off web hosting fees by sharing a server with other sites. Or, you may have multiple sites of your own on the same system. But, just as sharing a house can have benefits and drawbacks, so too with a server.
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The way computers communicate is, in a way, very similar to something very familiar: the postal system that delivers letters and packages. Here’’s how…

The Internet is just what the name suggests, a large inter-connected set of networks. But those networks are pointless without the one part that forms what is called their ”end-nodes”, otherwise known as computers. Those computers often need to share information because the people who use them want to share information.

But, in a system where there are millions of separate computers, how can you enable them all to communicate? One very important feature of that solution is performed by something called DNS, the Domain Name System.

Every part of a network that is going to send or receive information is assigned an IP address. That’’s a numeric identifier that uniquely specifies a particular ”node”, such as a computer, a router that directs traffic or other component. They look like this: 209.131.36.158

But those numbers are more difficult for people to remember and work with. They also aren”t very attractive from a marketing perspective. So, a naming system was layered on top of some of them, mostly the computers involved, though routers have names, too.

But once you have a system that associates a unique IP address to a given name, you need some way of keeping track of all of them. That’’s carried out by several different pieces of the system: Name Registrars, DNS Servers and other components.

The Name Registrars, overseen by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and other international bodies, provide and keep track of domain names. When you register with GoDaddy or any of a hundred other intermediate companies, ultimately that information makes its way into a number of specialized databases stored inside DNS Servers.

A DNS Server is the hardware and/or software that tracks and forwards the IP Address/Domain Name pair from one place to the next. In many cases, there are a number of them between your browser and the remote computer you want to share information with.

Suppose you request information from, say, Yahoo’’s site by clicking on a link on their site. DNS resolves (translates) the name of WHO IS making the request and OF WHOM, to addresses, then passes the request through the network to the requested IP address. The requested data is then passed back through the mesh of network components to your computer and displayed in your browser.

Whether the communication is between a desktop computer and a server somewhere, or between one server and another, the process is essentially the same. DNS servers translate names into IP addresses and the requests for data are forwarded on.

In some cases those DNS servers are part of a specialized network computer whose sole job is to do the translation and forwarding. In other cases the DNS software may reside on a server that also houses a database of general data, or stores email, or performs other functions.