I’ll assume if you’re reading this blog, you have a pretty good idea of what a website is. Well, a few weeks ago, we moved our website over to a new server. Don’t go scurrying off on me quite yet. I promise this won’t be too boring, you might actually find it interesting! Let’s pretend you live in the suburbs. Maybe you do live in the suburbs then no pretending is needed. Let’s say that you want to buy a horse, but you can’t keep it at your house because well, you live in the suburbs and the neighbors would have a fit. So, you buy your horse and you rent some space at a barn that is 20 minutes away in the country. Well, this is kind of how websites work. Your house is your computer, your horse is your website, and the barn you rent from is your server. It’s just a place to keep your website where everyone can get to it.
Let’s say, for the sake of this example, that you are very generous and you bought this horse so that anyone could come ride it (that is very nice of you, you’re a great person :)). Well, lets say that the barn only has one entrance, and there are 500 horses in the barn (I know, that’s probably not safe if there is a fire, but what the heck, there are no fires on the internet). When anyone tries to get to your horse, they have to wait 20 minutes because there is only one door and many other people are using it.
So, where does this all fit in with Alabu’s website? Well, a couple weeks ago we rented some land, and built our own barn. That’s right, we have our own barn all to ourselves now. The nice thing about this is that if we want to add windows, make it bigger, or put fluffy pink trim all around the stalls, we can! The expensive part about this is that it takes a lot of maintenance, nobody cleans the stalls for us, no one fixes the leaky roof for us, or patches the hole in the wall when the horse goes ballistic (luckily that hasn’t happened yet). We have to do all that ourselves.
I hope you’re not completely lost in that analogy. We didn’t actually just build a barn. We are renting something called a dedicated server. So far it has been a lot of work but it has really sped up our website (which will get even faster in the near future). We had some major problems initially. If you visit our website often, you would have noticed some weird behavior a few weeks ago. All is well now thoughe, and we hope you enjoy the increased performance! We also have a lot more freedom to do things we’ve been wanting to do for years, like upgrade our PHP installation (don’t worry about that one if you don’t know what it means). Well, enough fun with imaginary horses and barns and websites. I have to go feed the horses now (the real horses, out in our real barn), really.
H.M.
Wow, I never thought I could learn something about computers so quickly! You are a great teacher. Thank you, Hal!