Internet has become the key source of information for a majority of users as most of the population is on-line today. Information about each and every company, organization or individual is present on the Internet through a number of sources. People post and share information about any event they encounter, on Internet. So how all this information is stored and where is it stored is an interesting thing to know for the users.
Facebook itself has more than 500 terabytes of user data, applications and campaigns it hosts which is stored efficiently. It's not only about Facebook but the data of many other websites is also stored and processed at some location so where is all this data located? However, the simplest answer to the question is 'Everywhere'.
As everybody knows, Internet is not a single entity or a central repository instead it's a network of different types of computer systems. These computer systems range from a simple desktop PC to a complex web server, in terms of its functionality and architecture. Only difference between the data storage capabilities of a Giant company like Facebook, Google and Twitter and an average website or web-application is that the giants like Facebook have their own data storage facilities, dedicated in serving the user generated requests while other smaller entities rely on hosting services for their data requirements. The data on the internet is de-localized and is provided to user with series of branches or hops, with defined destination to the web server of that particular web application or website. Advanced technological concepts have assisted in faster information processing from this enormous data repository to provide faster results.
The size of internet data is exploding in recent years as the trend of information sharing and exchange has been introduced. The size of this data is so large that if it's realized practically then it can cover the whole geographical area of USA and China with 13 layers of books.
A major group of web apps or sites belong to average category in terms of budget, so this group of users depends on the sharing of resources which requires sharing of resources of other systems in order to maintain the large volume of data and this is where the actual information lies for users. The hardware level resources i.e. web servers, data centers etc. assist in faster processing and fetching of this data to make it available for the users.
With technology becoming easily accessible and economic with evolution of existing concepts, the large volume data storage became easy for website administrators. Technology solutions like Cloud computing and shared servers bring the advantage of maintaining a high quality web application with efficient customer profile data processing capability while keeping the cost of maintenance at the lowest level. These solutions provide access to their data centers over the internet. However, with some more investment, companies can localize their data centers inside their campus. Intra-networks are used for the purpose of maintenance and installation of additional modules in a website or web app.
In a conclusion, we can actually say that the data present over the internet is not localized in one location and it’s the capability inter-networking that allows users to access large amounts of data. Inter-network connects different computer systems all over the globe so as to make the information available on them for the users.