Ever noticed, HTTP or HTTPS which you generally see before the name of any website in your browser's URL browser and makes you curious about What is it all about?... In this article, you will get to know all about HTTP and HTTPS, Why is it there, What does it do, and much more.

Before starting you must know that the communication between the client computers and web servers is done by sending HTTP Requests and receiving HTTP Responses.

Now, What are Clients and Servers? Clients are often browsers but can be any type of program or device and servers are mostly the computers in the cloud. The communication between them is done through requests and responses.

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It is an application-layer protocol above the TCP layer that allows us to transfer the data from the server to the client. It has provided some standard rules to the web browser and servers, which they can use to communicate with each other.

1. The client( mostly a browser) sends an HTTP request to the web. (INPUT)

2. A web Server receives the request and runs an application to process the request.

3. The server returns an HTTP response to the browser. (OUTPUT)

4. The client (mostly a browser) receives the response.

It is a stateless protocol, which means that each transaction is executed separately without having any knowledge of the previous transaction. Once a transaction is completed, the connection gets lost.

However, the HTTP protocol does not provide the security of data, for this, we have HTTPS which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure which ensures the security of data.

HTTPS can be taken as an extended and secure version of HTTP. This protocol allows the transfer of data in encrypted form and uses an encryption protocol known as Secure Sockets Layer thus, it is used for web pages that transmit sensitive data like credit card information or login credentials.

So, this is what HTTP and HTTPS basically are in a nutshell!