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Development Tools HTTP Basics Introduction to HTTP HTTP Requests Using Telnet

Posted by Adam Lyles Kauffman
Adam Lyles Kauffman
14,016 Points

port 80?

im confused on what the port does in this telnet command. he was very brief, does the port specify the type of communication and 80 is HTTP messaging? did i understand that right?

1 Answer

adrian miranda
adrian miranda
13,561 Points

When you connect to a server, you need to specify not only the address of the server, but also a port number. The port number allows to the server to have different services on different ports. Port 80 is normally used for http. But this is only a convention, you could put something else on port 80. You could also run http on a different port, and that is not uncommon when someone has multiple web services on a single server.

Likewise, when you point your browser at an address to something like http://some.host it will use the http protocol (because the URL started with http:), and since you didn't give a specific port number, it will default to port 80.