DarthCaniac wrote that “servers don’t connect directly to the Internet”, which is ironically right and wrong at the same time.
Your home network (either your PC or your NAT router that provides connectivity to your other devices) is directly connected to the Internet like most servers. Remember that the Internet is a network of networks. Your home network, if it is connected to the Internet, forms a small part of the entire Internet. On the Internet, your own network is, in a sense, like a drop of water in an ocean; No one will notice if a single drop is removed from the ocean, but if all the drops were removed, there would be no more ocean. Internet is the same; lots of small networks all interconnected, any one of which can usually be removed without disrupting the whole, but if you remove them all then you don’t have internet.
Most endpoint sites are connected via from a single upstream network provider. This also applies to many smaller businesses that, for various reasons, have hardware on-premises and connected to the Internet, either to provide services to others or simply to allow their employees to browse Stack Exchange. This is your normal definition of an ISP; a company that provides you with Internet connectivity for your (host or) network, without any other special arrangements or expensive hardware required.
Some endpoint sites are connected through a set of upstream network providers , but each is used as one would normally use a single upstream provider. This is often known as uplink bonding or multiplexing, and is an inexpensive way to gain some degree of redundancy in your Internet service. More advanced small class and higher NAT routers have multiple WAN connections and so can do this natively, or you can assemble something on your own using an old PC with a couple of network cards and some network magic. software. The main difficulty setting this up for a person is probably being able to get upstream service from more than one ISP simultaneously, since each ISP connection probably requires a separate physical cable (or other physical layer link, such as a radio link), but it is by no means unachievable with a reasonable amount of money.
However, large end sites can use the same type of configuration as those Internet service providers (which in the two examples above you’ d be connected to) use themselves. Technically, what they do is known as upstream multi-peer peering (or, in some cases, just multi-peer peering in the parts of the Internet where the concept of “upstream” doesn’t exist: in core routing, this is the value predetermined). free zone). This option is generally not available to individuals and generally requires a willingness to spend a fair amount of money at the table. At the very least, you’ll need to come to a “peering deal” with at least two major ISPs in your area (you can do it with one, but that doesn’t make sense, except maybe as a springboard), and to do it for what you’ll likely need a subscriber border router (this is not the same as home or small business NAT “routers”, which are often just referred to as routers, but are actually more like gateways than the core routers of the Internet, and in some contexts they are called residential gateways although they are not used only in residential environments) that can speak the Border Gateway Protocol, and to speak BGP will need to request and receive an Autonomous System (AS) number. You’ll also need to contact the Internet Registry in your region (RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, etc.), request and receive a block of globally routable IP addresses, and especially if you want IPv4, you’ll need to prove your need for a block of addresses as big enough that people won’t balk at having that on their routers, possibly even in the default free zone, as well as demonstrate a willingness to pay for the privilege of having those IP addresses assigned to you.
That last one is probably what you wanted to ask, but as you can see, it’s actually quite complicated. Also, unless you are a large company and/or provide Internet connectivity to others, you really don’t have any significant advantage over the middle option of getting normal Internet access from two separate ISPs and multiplexing the upstream connections.
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