What Happens When You Type holbertonschool.com in Your Browser and Press Enter

Mohamed Charfi
3 min readSep 4, 2020

In this opportunity, our focus will be on what happens when you type holbertonschool.com in your browser and press enter. I invite you to get comfortable and ready to learn what’s going on under the hood when you request an URL.

First to cover is what is called as the DNS Query (or DNS Request). A DNS Request is the request of information from the user’s computer, known as the DNS Client, to a DNS Server. There are two ways this works: A Recursive Query and a non-Recursive Query.

TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol and IP stands for Internet Protocol. They are a set of standardized rules that allow for computers to communicate on the Internet. Individually they serve a purpose, where IP retrieves the the address to send data to and TCP takes care of data delivery once the IP is found. These two protocols are often used together so there isn’t any comparisons to be made.

How they both work is that they simply take this data that it receives and goes through what are called layers to ensure that the data is accurate and sent to the computer or server requesting it

A Firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls both incoming and outgoing network traffic using a set of predetermined rules. It is a system implemented in websites, servers and more as a means of protection against Cyber Attacks and Malware. . Up next is covering HTTPS.

HTTPS (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure) is the secure version of HTTP, which stands for the same thing, without secure in the title. It is used for secure communication across the internet and often used for the sole purpose of being ‘secure’. Websites use HTTPS as a means to protect the exchange of data between clients and their servers from the kinds of attacks mentioned earlier; Cyber Attacks and Malware. Man-in-the-middle attacks are when the attacker discreetly alters the communication between two parties, resulting in stolen information, corrupted information and more harmful circumstances. HTTPS prevents these attacks, keeping sites like www.holbertonschool.com safe for browsing. The next concept to talk about is Load-Balancer.

A Load-Balancer is a server that distributes either network or application traffic across a number of other servers. They are often used to increase the number of concurrent users and also the effectiveness of applications. Next is a Web Server.

A Web Server is simply software or hardware (like a computer for example) dedicated to running this kind of software, satisfying the requests of clients across the World Wide Web! Next is the application server.

An Application Server is literally just a server that hosts applications. Its framework allows for the creation of applications and server environments.

Database is the last concept to cover and what a database is, is a collection of data that can be accessed and stored from a computer.

Finally, after going through the main tools that work under the hoods when you request https://holbertonschool.com we know now what means that everything is working when you receive as a response this post after request it. Thanks for your time.

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