Somebody else's computer
Where Does a Website Actually Live?
A website is files on a real machine, delivered to you as small addressed packets.
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Step 1 of 5
A website is files on a real computer.
Somewhere there is a machine in a cooled room, plugged into power and cable, holding the actual pictures and text. Nothing lives in the air.
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Step 2 of 5
Your request is chopped into packets.
A page is far too big to send in one piece, so it travels as many small chunks that are put back in order once they all arrive at your end.
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Step 3 of 5
Every packet carries its own address.
Each chunk is wrapped in a label saying where it is going, where it came from, and which piece of the whole it happens to be.
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Step 4 of 5
Routers pass packets hop by hop.
No machine knows the whole route. Each router simply reads the address, picks whichever neighbour looks closest, and hands the packet on.
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Step 5 of 5
Lost packets are simply asked for again.
Nothing guarantees delivery, so your machine keeps track of which pieces arrived and politely requests any that never turned up.
A packet from London to Sydney crosses about 17,000 kilometres of cable and usually makes the round trip in under 300 milliseconds.
The short version
A website lives as files on a real computer somewhere, and reaches you as small addressed packets handed from router to router.
Try it yourself
On a computer, run a traceroute to a foreign website. Every line printed is one real machine your request hopped through.
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