Anyone can build a web page, and it can contain any information you wish to publish to the outside world. You may have strong political beliefs, and wish to publish a paper expounding on those beliefs. Or you may have strong religious beliefs, and you may want to post something to try to persuade more people to accept your position. Or you may just have some recipies, or poetry, or prose you want to share with the world. You may have a hobby collecting something, and you may want to tell the world what you have in your collection, with the hopes that others that share in your hobby, may see something you have that they want, and they may offer to trade you something you want more than what you have. Or your son may be in Little Leagues, and you may want to put up a page for his team, showing the team's schedule, statistics on each player, photos of the team, etc. Or you may be a fan of a particular singer or band, or television show, or actor, etc and you may want to share photos and other information you know about them with the world.
About every other month we run a program in one of the two Internet meetings we have each month showing people how to build web pages, and you can learn how to do it by attending some of those meetings. Or there are a number of people, myself included, that build web pages for other people for a small fee, and you may elect to pay one of them to build your web page, rather than having to learn how to do it yourself.
Once you have your page created what do you do with it? Most ISPs make available a certain amount of web space on their system for each of their customers, so as long as you pay your monthly bill for access to the net, your page will be available. Some ISPs don't care whether your web page promotes a business or just promotes a hobby, political or religious belief, etc, as long as it does not contain pornography (Oklahoma Law in that area is fairly strict), but there are a few that say that if you do business on your web page, you must pay extra for a commercial web page. When you pay that extra your page will be put on a separate commercial web server, which is good, and as we will see in just a minute, may be important for a web page that is likely to be very popular, but a small home based business that just wants to post its prices and a list of services on the internet, so they can list a web page on their business card, may find the monthly commercial web page charges too high.
A web server can only handle a certain number of "connections" or browsers connected to it at one time. To see where this can create a problem, consider http://www.lawyersweekly.com. Judge Zobel is obviously a big internet user, and he came up with the idea that he was going to publish his decision on whether to override the jury's decision and declare the "Au Pair" innocent, or whether to grant her a new trial, or whether to reduce the charge to manslaughter, on the Massachusetts Lawyer's Weekly Web Page. Paul J Martinek, publisher of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly said that he was flattered that Judge Zorbel would think of them as a vehicle for disseminating the decision, and that as the leading source of court opinions and other legal news for attorneys in Massachusetts, they are a natural venue to help communicate the decision", but what Judge Zorbel did not consider was the fact that the Lawyer's Weekly web server can only handle a certain number of "connections" at one time.
Did you try to connect to the web page to see what was there? You probably either got the message "There was no response. The server could be down or is not responding" or you could have gotten "A Network error occurrent while Netscape was receiving data. Network error. Socket is not connected. Try connecting again"
Those are the two errors I got most of the time when I tried. Watching the bottom of my netscape screen I first saw "Looking Up http://www.lawyersweekly.com" which is when my computer was sending a message to my ISP's DNS Name Server to convert "www.lawyersweekly.com" into a series of numbers (called an IP) which it needed to send a request to that website requesting the desired page. Once it got the DNS information it sent a message to the web site. If the site was so busy dealing with other people all over the world trying to find out what had happened, it gave the first "No Response" message.
Some of the time the server was able to understand the request I was making, but since it was currently busy serving the maximum number of people it could handle at one time, it would send the second "Try connecting again" message.
On a couple of occasions I was successful getting connected to the site's main web page. I never was able to get connected to the specific web page listed by CNN http://www.lawyersweekly.com/matreas.htm#latest.
I am happy that Judge Zorbel recognizes that the Internet is a good place to make information equally available to everyone, but he did not understand the fact that everyone wanted access to that information at the same time, and that the Lawyer's Weekly web server just could not handle the load.
The number of simultaneous connections is not the only problem a web author needs to consider when selecting a site to house his web page. He also has to worry about the bandwidth available at that site. Let us say the web server is on a T1 connection (1.5 mb/sec) to the backbone. Just to make the math easy, let us assume the web server can service 100 simultaneous connections, not just to our web site, but to all web sites on that server. Now let us assume that the author of one of the other web pages on that site knows how much trouble it was for him to get IE 4.0 (or the latest version of Netscape, or whatever other program you might name that is in high demand), and he puts up a copy of the program on his web page, and tells everyone in the area it is there to be downloaded. If most of the 100 simultaneous connects we are speculating our web server can support are being used to deliver copies of IE 4.0, the effective speed for any one of those transfers, or access to any other web page on the server, including our web page, will be 15kb -- and you wonder why your 56kb modem does not seem to be working as fast as it should (it may be able to deliver data to you faster, but the data from the web site I just described will be coming in at just 15kb/sec.
So a commercial site that expects a lot of people to try to access it at the same time (whether to find out a court decision, or get a copy of IE, or some large graphic file, or anything else), and/or which expects to be called upon to deliver a large volume of data to the net (large bandwidth) needs to be on a server where the needs (connections and bandwidth) of all other sites on that server have been taken into consideration. Such a web site should not be installed on an ISP's "free web space", because it would be mixed in with the web pages of all other users for that ISP. But a web page that really does not expect very many accesses, but is just put online so people will be able to find out about the company and its product line in case one does an internet search, should not have a problem being on an ISP's free page.
Let us assume you want more control over your web space than mixing your web page with all of the other users of an ISP. One alternative would be to lease a permanent connection of a certain speed from an ISP, and set up a computer in your own home or business that is online all the time. This could be expensive for a single person, but it might be a reasonable consideration for someone that builds web pages for others. Right now I don't build that many web pages for others, so when I build one I then point them at an ISP and suggest they get an account with that provider and I put their page there. But if I wanted to make the investment, I could buy a computer and a permanent connection from an ISP and use it to house the web pages of each of my customers. Those customers would then pay me not just for designing their web page, but they would pay me a monthly fee to keep it online. I would need to have enough customers paying me monthly fees to be able to justify the monthly fee I would have to pay my ISP for the permanent connection, plus something to help pay for the money I invested in the computer. I would still run the risk that someone digging a trench for a sewer line could cut my permanent connection, and then all of the web pages of all of my customers would no longer be on the net. Or I could take my computer to an ISP's office, like Murray was describing, and pay him a fee to keep it at his place of business, and with a direct connection to the internet.
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