Part 1 of 4. Ten years ago, it cost thousands of dollars per year to host a Website. Now, hosting a Website costs just a few dollars per month. Today, businesses of any size can benefit from the growing spectrum of opportunities online.

First things first, however. What is website marketing? Whereas traditional marketing methodologies use media such as newspapers and television, website marketing taps into the unique opportunities afforded by websites, the internet, email and search engines.

In order to better understand these unique opportunities, here are a few key concepts:

The world wide web is a global interlinked network of hypertext documents. Navigable via browser, users can view a vast array of text and multimedia content in an interconnected manner.

These documents are served up via a web server, a computer program that accepts requests from the user’s browser and sends back the specified document or content. Web servers communicate with browsers via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Web servers are located at IP addresses, globally unique groupings of numbers. For instance, the web server for google.com is located at 63.146.123.0. If the IP is your business’s difficult-to-remember physical address, its name is the more memorable detail which is seen more often.

Each server can host dozens if not thousands of distinct websites, each with its own unique domain name, IP address and content. This practice has become common for hosting companies, and is one of the major factors behind the massive drop in hosting costs.

Easily remembered domain names are translated into cryptic IP addresses by the domain name system (DNS). Any resource or service connected to the internet can be assigned a unique name, thus eliminating the need to remember IP addresses by making them readable by human and computer alike.

If all of these terms are making your head spin, here is an example that might paint a clearer picture. Be sure to check out Parts 1-2 and 4.

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