What happens when you type a web address and press Enter
Web servers: where a web page really is before it reaches your screen
You open a web page, and it fills your screen in a second. The page was never on your phone. It was on a computer that may be on another continent, and that computer waited for someone to ask for it.
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1
You opened en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon, and a page about the Moon fills your screen. Look inside your phone: your photos are there, your songs, your apps. The page is not there, and it never was.
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2
Your browser, the app you open web pages with, has no copy either. So when you press Enter, it writes a message asking for the page, called a request, and sends it far away.
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3
The request lands in a building you will never see, at a computer whose whole job is to wait for requests and answer them. A computer with that job is called a server.
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4
The server keeps the page and sends your browser a copy, so the page is still there for the next request.
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5
Two strangers, Miva and Rono, ask for the same page on their phones, and each gets a copy too. A server answers whoever asks, so it stays on day and night.
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6
That is the whole trip: a request out, a copy back. Yet to find that one server among all the computers of the internet, your browser had only the line you typed.
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Go further
Three words you will hear about this trip, and the oldest server of all.