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Are You Really On The Web?

Sometimes people ask if the Web is getting cluttered up with too many websites, but we forget that the Web is not an actual place, and in terms of spaciousness it's only as big or as small as we choose it to be at any moment.

Where does your website live really? It's sitting on a computer hard drive somewhere in your hosting company's rack of server equipment, and maybe you have a webmaster with a copy somewhere, and you might even have a copy of it sitting on your own computer. Mileage may vary, but that's generally all the real estate you've got tied up in housing your website.

The important copy is the one sitting on your hosting company's computer, which is wired into the network of millions of other computers that serve data to any computer that makes the proper request using a web browser.

That's the most reliable address for where your website lives, if you can call it living. It really only comes alive when someone out there calls for it in their browser, and then for those brief moments of fame it flickers brightly on the Web. And then it's gone again. Even CNN doesn't exist "on the Web" unless people call it up - like Peter Pan it only lives if we believe in it.

Not to worry, by the way, CNN stays lit up around the clock, as does Amazon and many others. But there are perhaps millions of websites that sit quietly on computers around the world, not getting in the way or cluttering up anything, held for posterity in the Wayback Machine [archive.org], and turning slowly over time into an archaeological humus, to be sifted through one day in the future, maybe, and then again maybe not.

How often does YOUR website light up with activity?

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