The Internet as we know it is a digital global village. It has made life easier and opened the world to many opportunities that we didn't know exists.
Nowadays, It is very easy to access the internet, from something as big as our television sets at home to tiny raspberry PI devices; all you just need is an internet connection, a browser, and boom information at your fingertips! But have you ever wondered what goes on under the hood when you enter a web address such as 'hashnode.com' or 'google.com'? I will be using the example of a barn on a farm and a supermarket to help you understand this.
Imagine you live on a farm and your farm has a barnyard and not too far from your barnyard there is a little grocery shop. On a particular day, you decide to eat a red apple and you want it fresh. A logical thing to do will be to check if you farm red apples if you do, you check if it's available in your barn as a harvested produce. If it is unavailable, you'd check if you can pluck it fresh from the farm. If it is not on your farm, you'd check the grocery section in the supermarket for that red apples and when you find it, you buy lots of them so that you can have them in storage.
It is the same when you type a hashnode's URL in your browser. Hashnode's URL is like that red apple you crave. When you hit enter after typing, the browser first checks in its cache(in-memory storage) if you have visited that website before and if it remembers its IP address (just like how you searched your barn for the red apple). When it discovers you have not been to that address before it checks your ISP's(internet service provider) DNS server if it knows and recognizes the IP address belonging to hashnode, if the DNS server does not recognize it, it sends it to a ROOT DNS server(like you visiting the supermarket). Once it finds the IP address that belongs to hashnode it initiates a connection with it(or in our analogy, you find the grocery section for red apples in the supermarket). To communicate over the network, internet protocol is followed. TCP/IP is the most common protocol. Finally, the connection is built between your browser(client) and the hashnode's server . Now, they both can communicate with each other and share information. After the connection, the browser sends a request to the server that particular content (or hashnode's homepage in this context ) is required by you the server sends back a response which includes the content you have requested for. After browsing, your browser stores the address in its cache so that when next you want to browse, it knows where to look. This is like you storing the red apples you bought in your barn or remembering the name of the supermarket that sold the apples for future use.
This is a simple understanding of what happens when you need to access hashnode from your computer, I hope you benefited from this post.
P.S I hope I didn't suck at it, it is my second time writing something.
Thanks for reading!