An entrepreneur does not have to know how to program, just as a restaurant owner does not have to know how to fix the fridge. But a restaurant owner who does not know where the main switch is will one day be left in the dark on a Friday evening with a full house. I have often seen businesses lose money, customers and nerves not because of complex technical problems but because of not understanding the most basic things: who owns the domain, where the website lives, why emails to customers end up in spam. So I will try to explain how the internet works the way I would explain it to a friend over dinner, without a single line of code. Let us imagine the internet is a huge city.
The address and the phone book: IP and DNS
Every computer connected to the internet has an address, a set of numbers called an IP address. It is like the exact coordinates of a building on a map. People are bad at remembering coordinates, so names were invented: domains such as ingello.com. To find the coordinates by name, there is DNS, the domain name system. It is the city's phone book. When you type a website address, the browser first asks this book "where does so-and-so live?", gets the numbers and only then drives to the address.
The practical conclusion here is very important. A domain is not property forever but a rented name that has to be renewed, and it is registered to a specific person or company. I have come across businesses whose domain was registered to a former employee or to a contractor they had fallen out with. It is as if the sign above your shop and your entry in the phone book belonged to a stranger. One day they may simply not renew the lease, and your address will go to someone else.
The land and the building: hosting and servers
A website or system physically lives on a server, an ordinary computer, only a powerful one, switched on around the clock in a special building called a data centre. Hosting is renting space on such a computer. To continue the city metaphor, the server is the building and hosting is the lease on the land and premises. Cheap hosting is like a room in a dormitory: inexpensive, but the neighbours are noisy, and if someone starts a fire, everyone suffers. A dedicated server is like your own house: more expensive, but the rules are yours.
Hence the second conclusion: the speed and reliability of a website depend directly on where it lives. A slow website loses visitors, as every major search engine and online shop measured long ago: each extra second of loading sends some of the people to a competitor. A person on the internet is as impatient as a shopper standing in a queue at a till that does not work.
Letters in envelopes: HTTP and HTTPS
Once the browser has found the server, they start corresponding. The language of this correspondence is called HTTP. The browser writes "give me the home page", the server replies "here it is". This correspondence used to travel on postcards: any postman along the way could read what was inside, including passwords and card numbers. HTTPS is the same correspondence in a sealed envelope with a wax seal. The padlock in the browser's address bar means the envelope is closed and the seal is genuine. Today browsers mark a site without HTTPS as insecure, and that kills trust instantly. The good news is that an HTTPS certificate has long been available for free, the only question is making sure someone keeps track of its renewal.
The internet is neither a cloud nor magic. It is a city of buildings, roads, addresses and postmen. And as in any city, it matters to know who owns your house.
What is inside the building: code and database
A simple website is like a shop window with signs: the pages lie ready and the server simply hands them out. But most business systems work differently. They have code that thinks and a database that remembers. When a customer places an order, the code checks stock, calculates the price, writes the order to the database and sends an email. The database is the warehouse and the accounts department at once, the most valuable thing in the system. Code can be rewritten, but lost customer data cannot be brought back by anyone.
That gives the third conclusion: backups. Not "somewhere on the contractor's server", but regular, tested backups stored in a different place. I have seen companies find out they had no backups on exactly the day they needed them. That is a very expensive way to learn something new.
Mail and roadside warehouses: email and CDN
Two more things come up in business all the time. The first is email. To keep your emails to customers out of spam, mail services check whether you are entitled to send mail on behalf of your domain. For that, special records are written into the same DNS phone book. Without them your emails look like an impostor's, and the mail service hides them. The second is a CDN, a content delivery network. It is like warehouses next to the roads in different cities: your site's images and files are stored closer to the visitor, and the page opens faster wherever they are.
What to do tomorrow
I am not urging you to become a programmer. I am urging you to know where the main switch is. Here is a short list worth checking this week:
- Who the domain is registered to and when the registration expires. You should have your own access to the registrar.
- Where the hosting is and whether you have access to it, not just the contractor.
- Whether HTTPS works and who is responsible for renewing the certificate.
- Whether there are database backups, where they are stored and when they were last tested.
- Whether the mail records for the domain are set up so that emails reach customers.
At Ingello Systems we often begin work with a new client with exactly this kind of audit, and we almost always find at least one item that could one day bring the business to a halt. That is no reason to panic, it is a reason to put things in order while the lights are still on.
