I once heard a colleague say, "I SSH'd into the server" to deploy something. It all seemed so magical.
I remember the first time I heard that — it seemed so abstract, and my skill level felt so out of sync, literally. But just like babies learn to crawl (some of us later than others), we begin to see patterns. And that's all it really is, patterns, things built on top other things.
Before we go on, here's a simple analogy. Imagine an estate, and in it, apartments. Only one person can be in one apartment at any single time. Keep these similarities in mind: the estate address is the IP address, and the apartment number is the port number. Many of these apartments are usually empty, so people can go live there — or someone living in apartment 5 can vacate, and next time you visit, you find someone else in apartment 20.
For a long time, I imagined "ports" only as USB ports on a system. That's not quite true — those are just the computer's physical ports, i.e. USB connectors. But there are also network ports, which is what we're referring to here.
So let's say you want to go to Yusuf's house. His street (IP) address is 192.168.88.100, and his house (port) is 80. If Yusuf lives at port 80, he lets you in. But if no one lives there, you're simply told "connection refused" — which just means no one is there.
