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Infrastructure
Underneath the routing is concrete and fibre: the buildings, edges and cables the web physically runs on — and the few players who own most of it.
What it is
Every abstract IP ultimately terminates in a physical machine, in a building, in a country, drawing real power. And the layers between the user and that machine — CDNs, clouds, proxies — increasingly belong to a handful of companies.
This is where the web stops being a metaphor and becomes real estate, electricity and undersea cable — and where "everywhere" turns out to be a short list of operators.
Going deeper
A handful of clouds — AWS, Azure, Google — host an outsized share of the significant web, and a few CDNs front much of the rest. The upside is reliability and scale; the downside is systemic: a single provider’s outage takes down a swathe of unrelated services, and a single jurisdiction’s law reaches all of them at once.
When a site sits behind a CDN or reverse proxy, what you resolve and connect to is the edge, not the origin server — the real machine’s address is deliberately concealed behind it. Finding the true origin (through old DNS records, certificate leaks, or misconfigured direct-connect subdomains) is a discipline of its own, because the proxy is precisely what a site pays to stand in the way.
Strip away the abstraction and the internet is real estate and electricity: datacenters drawing megawatts, fibre run along rail and road, and submarine cables making landfall at a few dozen stations that carry entire continents’ traffic. Those physical chokepoints — a landing station, a cable, a power grid — are where the digital and the geopolitical meet.
The physical building the servers sit in.
A datacenter is the ground truth: a specific facility with an address, a power draw, a cooling plant and an operator. Peering and facility registries turn an abstract IP into a place you could stand outside.
Edge caches that serve content near the user — and hide the origin.
A content delivery network caches a site’s content at edge locations worldwide for speed and DDoS protection. It also masks the origin server: what you resolve is the CDN edge, not where the site truly lives.
AWS, Azure, GCP — where most of the web now rents.
The hyperscalers rent compute and storage at scale; the majority of significant sites run on one of a few of them. That concentration is efficiency and a systemic chokepoint at once — a handful of ASNs front an enormous share of the web.
The front door that terminates TLS, filters, and hides the origin.
A reverse proxy or web application firewall sits in front of a site — terminating TLS, filtering malicious traffic, and concealing the true origin behind it (the classic Cloudflare pattern). It is security and opacity in one layer.
The physical intercontinental links, and where they come ashore.
The intercontinental internet runs on submarine fibre-optic cables that make landfall at a small number of landing stations. Those landings are physical chokepoints — cut or tap one and you affect a continent’s connectivity.
Edge locations where a network meets others and users.
A PoP is a physical access point of a network — where it interconnects with other networks and reaches local users. The map of a provider’s PoPs is the map of its real-world reach.
Read it honestly
Infrastructure is the most concrete layer and the one that most exposes centralisation — but CDNs and reverse proxies deliberately obscure the origin, so "where a site is hosted" often means "which intermediary fronts it," not where its data truly sits. Seeing past the proxy is its own discipline.
Take Infrastructure from reference to the live system.