Location, Location, Location

Some would say that a website exists on the hard drive of the machine that acts as the server that’s connected to the Internet.

That may have been true during the Web’s infant years, but not anymore.

A website is on backup drives of other machines, maybe in the same building, maybe in the same city street. It could also be in the cloud, on some other machine halfway around the world.

It could be in a laptop of some kid in a bedroom who used a free software to download the complete website, so he could review it even without an Internet connection. It could be a .zip file. it could be on a memory card, or a thumb drive. It could be on a writable DVD. It could be on a floppy disk.

It could be a set of printouts that a graduate student has clipped together to read on the train. Parts of it could be citations in a book or a term paper. Parts of it could be on a website that mines and classifies images and phrases for specific topics. Parts of it are probably on Wikipedia, Google images, and Reddit.

Parts of it are definitely not on the same machine as the other files. Video files are on YouTube, statistics files on Google Analytics, and sound files on SoundCloud. Not to mention its other bits and pieces that are scattered throughout Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and LinkedIn, to name a few.

So where on Earth does a website exist?

It’s everywhere. It’s anywhere.

So where should a person work on a website that’s everywhere and anywhere?

Everywhere. Anywhere.