Web Page Request?

[Beno]

Hey Every1,

Just want to someone to confirm with me if I am correct or not.

When I request a web page, say www.pcguide.com (http://www.pcguide.com) the url gets interprted into a numerical address by the DNS server at my ISP and then the request gets forwarded of to the pcguides web server.

Does the page thats returned by pcguide.com go through my ISP's server and then to me or does the page go direct from the pcguide's web server to my machine??

Cheers

Beno :-)

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Have a nice day

[sea69]

I could be mistakin here, but in order for it to get to you- it must go through your ISP.

or is this a Trick question??

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

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homepage (http://www.seanweb1.homestead.com/3.html)




[This message has been edited by sea69 (edited 12-15-2001).]

[Paleo Pete]

Yep, that's about right. Your ISP acts similar to a router, that's basically its job, route your internet requests to the proper outside servers.

The Internet works like a huge network, known as a WAN (Wide Area Network) but connected by phone lines instead of NIC cards and CAT5 cable. Your ISP is the equivalent of a server on a LAN. The ISP is your connection to the Internet and all its various servers, so everything you do on the Internet is routed through that server.

If you do a trace route you will see that it actually makes several "hops", or connections, along the way, sometimes as many as 30. Each is a server similar to your ISP and simply passes the request along to the next server in line until it gets to the one that has the webpage stored on it.

So if you live in New York, for instance, your trace route may show the connection going to Pittsburg, then Atlanta, then Florida, then Chicago and a few others and finally to the server the PC Guide is actually on. Don't ask me why they take the routes they do, I've seen some weird ones when I was using Mplayer, it had a traceroute function that would list up to 15 hops I think it was, maybe 20. Sometimes it would crisscross all over the place...

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