WHAT'S NEW?

How Stuff Works
  • Print

http://www.howstuffworks.comwww.howstuffworks.com
Site of the Week

I have been migrated. Grammatically, that is impossible, but the Internet makes a mockery of correct English. This week, for the first time in eight years online, my web site was moved from one host server to another.

That doesn’t affect the reader. You can’t tell the difference. The domain name is the same and all 7,500 html web pages look just as they did before the migration. That makes sense. A Canadian goose looks the same when it arrives in Mexico as it did when it left Canada. But like the goose, I had a harrowing journey.

My tension grew from the simple fact that I didn’t have a clue what was going on. It started when Norm, the new webmaster, said I was paying too much money for too little server space. He said he could get me three times the real estate for one-quarter the price. But I was nervous. What if something went wrong? What if the site went down? What if things came out all mutated and creepy on the other end, like Jeff Goldblum in the movie "The Fly"?

I get about 10,000 unique visitors a day during the cold winter months, and the thought of even one of them getting a FILE NOT FOUND message gave me the shivvers. Norm tried to explain the process, but most of the words he used were unfamiliar. There was a lot of stuff about "DNS servers" and "IP addresses" and "protocols". I had to trust that Norm knew what he was doing, which is not an easy thing when your electronic baby – eight years work -- is potentially being transmogrified into a hideous alien life-form.

Things got even hairier when webmaster Tim, who designed the site, flipped a switch somewhere to start the process. Then my email browser went down for a few moments as we made the switchover and I called my software guru Bill. I wanted to be sure nothing could happen to the tens of thousands of electronic letters I have saved up in my harddrive, to which I hope some day to reply. When I tried uploading a new article to the web site via my FTP server, the thing hiccuped. My world was falling apart.

"Don’t worry," Norm said. "Everything is propagating just fine."

"Propagating? Isn’t that what rabbits do?" I said. "I thought we were migrating like geese."

THE WEB SITE MAKER

When I don’t know how stuff works, I go to a web site called HowStuffworks.com. Want to know how the Mars rover operates? How about the actions of a political caucus, digital TV, night vision goggles or the game of football? You can get it all from this Georgia-based company on the Web, on CD, in books and through their magazine for students and teachers. With 4 million visitors a week, HowStuffWorks.com is now among the Top 400 busiest sites on the Web.

I wrote to the public relations director at the web site. I was warned that, due to the volume of letters, I might not get a response by deadline. I didn’t. With 40 million pages being accessed monthly, apparently these guys are busy. The site has won awards and attention all over. Time magazine included How Stuff Works on their Top 50 web site list. So did Popular Science and PC Magazine. The site was rated A+ by Entertainment Weekly, which is pretty amazing considering Scientific American and the Washington Post felt the same way.

Rather than splatter the pages with excessive advertising, something classroom teachers abhor, HowStuffWorks.com appears to use a combination of sponsorships, banners, ads and partnerships to pay its way. Through "integrated" sponsorships, advertisers can dominate content areas. A cell phone maker, for example, can get exclusive advertising and link rights to the page"How Cell Phones Work".

The sight is the brainchild of, believe it or not, a guy named Marshall Brain. Brain has a master's degree in Computer Science, taught the same subject at a college, then worked in software and consulting. It’s nice when people with good ideas find success. The site is divided into handy searchable sections with thousands of explanations on computers, cars, electronics, science, home, entertainment, health, money and travel-related stuff.

THE UP SHOT

But back to my problem -- here is what I learned. I found a clear and detailed essay in the COMPUTER section of HowStuffWorks.com entitled "How Domain Name Servers Work" by Marshall Brain himself.

A DNS is a critical, but invisible, part of the Internet. After Norm copied my web site onto a "mirror" host, for a few days, there were actually two identical versions of my site running simultaneously at two locations. The trick was to tell the Internet that version A is shutting down and version B is taking over. I thought the transfer had to happen at the precise second, but that’s not the way the Web works.

As Brain explains, we access web sites via domain names, like HowStuffWorks.com. Computers communicate with numbers, not words, so the computer version of that web address is 216.183.103.150. That is the "IP address" or Internet protocol address. Every machine (computers, servers, etc) has such an address so that the machines can talk. Each time we access a web site – via email or web pages – the DNS translates the domain names into computer language. Millions of people are requesting billions of those changes every day, while new web site and web pages are going up all the time. Add email connections to that traffic. That’s a lot of translating and the DNS database has become the busiest central switching station on Earth.

All web sites, in order to get onto the Internet, need a domain name. After registering your domain, to activate it, you must be assigned a domain name server. Because the Internet is dynamic and huge, no one machine can know where every address is, so lots of machines know where lots of addresses are. The trick is to find the machine that knows where to find the address of the data you are seeking and get you there fast.

When Norm changed my hosting server from one machine to another, the domain name stayed the same, but the address of that data moved. By alerting the DNS to that change, we started a process in which one DNS told another about the change, and then that name server told another name server – "Hey, Buddy, that web site has moved over to this new address."

I actually watched it happening. We could see people contacting the web server in Miami. But as the name servers passed on the location of the new server, fewer people were contacting the Miami version. Initially only Norm and I knew about the Oregon location, but as the Internet taught itself the new IP address, a trickle of visitors were directed there. Forty-eight hours later it was over. All the DNS knew the same info and the old servers were ready for shut down. The migration was complete. Boy, were my arms tired.

Okay, I really don’t get it, but I feel better. The most amazing thing, as Marshall Brain explains on How Things Work, is that that this system allows billions of connections to be made daily in micro-seconds. Yet no one really owns the Web. We only rent the domain names. It’s all just electronic data sitting on millions of machines. Even the name servers that make the links possible are run and owned by zillions of different people, all contributing a bit of information to the collective brain.