• Created: 23/07/2026
• Last updated: 23/07/2026

Ever wondered what actually happens after you type a website address into your browser?

In less than a second, your computer finds the right server somewhere on the internet, establishes a secure connection, and downloads everything needed to display the page. It’s a complex, and thankfully automated process.

Most of the time you don’t need to think about any of this. But if you own a website, you’ll eventually come across terms like hosting, DNS, domain names, and SSL certificates. Knowing what they are, and what they do makes it much easier to understand what you’re paying for, who’s responsible for each part, and what might have gone wrong when something stops working.

This article will give a simplified, but usable overview of the process, without going too much into networking.

Starting from the outside with a new user typing in your domain name, and following the process from their browser across the internet all the way to your server and back as your website is finally on their screen for them to look at, we will learn what all the main parts are and what they do. how to find a website

First, the browser looks up the DNS records for your domain name to find your server’s IP address. It then connects to that server, establishes a secure HTTPS connection, and only then starts downloading the files that make up your website.

Every one of these pieces needs to be in place for your people to view your website. Let’s look at each part in turn.

Domain name

Your domain name is a unique, human friendly label for your website. It’s what people type into their browser to find your site, e.g. n10e.co.

You register and renew domain names through a domain registrar. They are responsible for managing ownership of your domain and pointing it at your DNS provider.

A website can have more than one domain name, but each domain name only points to one website at a time. For example, n10e.co, nathansplace.uk, and nathansplace.co.uk all direct visitors to this website.

Domain names are made up of different parts separated by full stops. In www.n10e.co, co is the top-level domain (TLD), n10e is the second-level domain, and www is a subdomain.

DNS

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s what computers use to connect your domain name to your actual website.

When you register a domain name, you’ll also set up DNS records for it. There are a few different types of these, but the one we care about here is called an A record. It’s what points from your domain name at your server’s IP address (more on that below).

The company looking after these records for you is your DNS provider. This is often the same company as your domain registrar, but doesn’t have to be, and how your registrar knows who your DNS provider is comes down to something called nameservers. Nameservers are domains that point from your domain registrar to your DNS provider.

In practice, your computer usually doesn’t ask your DNS provider directly, it asks a DNS resolver (often run by your ISP) to do the lookup for you. But the end result is the same: it finds your DNS provider and gets back your server’s IP address.

As you can see from this, DNS is also a distributed system. Lots of servers around the world working together, keeping copies of these records in sync. This is why changes to DNS records can take up to 24 hours to fully take effect worldwide.

IP address

IP stands for Internet Protocol. An IP address is the unique address of a computer on a network. And the internet is just a gigantic network. This is the actual address that your DNS records point to: your domain name is the human-readable label, but your IP address is the actual route to your server.

For your website to be reachable, your server needs a public IP address. This is a fixed address the rest of the internet can go to in order to find it.

Hosting on a server

A server is just a computer connected to the internet which is hosting one or more websites. Big websites will run on multiple servers at once, but many just have the one.

Someone has to look after the physical computer(s) which run your website. They pay the electric bill, do the dusting, and so on. The business doing this for you is your Hosting Provider. I often use Digital Ocean for this.

Your hosting provider can be the same company as your domain registrar and DNS provider, but doesn’t have to be. Your actual website

Once someone has found your domain name, and their browser has looked up DNS records for it, to find your IP address, and then gone to the server at that address, they are now accessing software on your server via the internet. This is your actual website.

HTTPS

But wait, there’s more! Before your server starts sending website files back, it establishes a secure connection with the browser. This is done using a protocol called TLS (Transport Layer Security). TLS replaced the older SSL (Secure Socket Layer), and it encrypts all further communication between the user’s browser and your server.

For this to work, your server needs a TLS certificate, signed by a trusted certificate authority (CA). These used to cost money, but these days you can get one for free through Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit certificate authority backed by the likes of Mozilla and the EFF.

The process of establishing this secure connection is called a TLS handshake. The https:// at the start of a web address tells you that a TLS handshake will take place, securing the connection between your browser and the server.

An interesting tangent here. As I said, TLS secures your communication with the server from this point on. Making your interactions with the website private. However, the preceding steps aren’t always private! Traditionally, DNS queries are sent in plain text, so in theory anyone on the network path (like your ISP for example) could see which websites you are visiting, even though they can’t see what you actually do once you get there.

Front end website

Now that all of this has been done, the files which make up the user facing part of your website can be sent securely over the internet, back to the users browser and rendered for them to see.

The part of your website, which is downloaded and runs in the users browser, is called the ‘front end’. This is normally made up of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and media files.

Back end website

The part of your website which runs on your server is called the ‘back end’. This is the part of the system where any sensitive or persistent data should be handled. It often generates the files which make up the front end of the website.

This part of the system can be written in any language which the server understands such as elixir or python, and is often based on a web framework like phoenix or a content management system (CMS) such as wagtail.

The back end can talk to other services such as a database for persisting data, or an email server for sending email notifications.

Conclusion

All the terms discussed above are regular causes of confusion, so I hope this demystifies things somewhat. We increasingly rely on all of this technology as we go about our daily lives, so I think it’s good for everyone to have some understanding of how a website makes its way from the internet to your screen.