The internet encompasses business, academics, and leisure, and technology is the driving force behind it. Besides fuelling e-commerce and e-services, the internet harbors a plethora of new models of communication, such as RSS, VOIP, video, multimedia, webcasts, and podcasts.
Internet service providers and application service providers have continuously upgraded their products and services to accommodate constantly changing web technologies. In the quest to provide faster internet speed, the hardware is becoming more powerful, but from the perspective of physical dimensions and costs, it is getting smaller. For instance, if you want to have your own server for a simple website that you have designed, you can set up the server at a very low cost. All you need is a normal PC with an Intel Celeron Processor, a Linux, or Windows NT operating system with Apache Web Server loaded on it. You will also have to connect your machine to the net through a T3 line. That’s all.
For larger websites, however, the technological infrastructure that is needed to provide consistently fast bandwidth speed is much larger. To handle millions of visitors each day, the websites either require a massive machine with very powerful processors and a large amount of RAM, redundancy, and disk space, or they may distribute the load to several machines that are extremely powerful. The Domain Name Server (DNS) and the load balancing switches are used predominantly for this purpose.
The demand for faster internet speed is always on the increase; so is the size of web pages. Many of the web pages today are dynamic too, making it imperative for ISPs and web hosting services to incorporate the latest internet technologies to deliver a fast bandwidth speed.