What did you do last weekend? Dig the garden? Spot of DIY? Take the kids to the park? Not me. I saw the beating heart of the internet, walked among its entrails and felt its power reverberate through my bones. Alright, I got confused with The Matrix a bit there, but it felt like that in the cavernous datacentre of web hosting firm Strato.

Sometimes writing about technology it’s easy to become detached from the hard reality – the nuts and bolts, servers and wires, chips and switches. And sometimes you forget the awe-inspiring technological achievements we have made in recent decades. Strato is one of the largest hosts in Europe, with about 15,000 servers and growing at its Berlin base. Quite a sight, and quite a site – although its location is a strict secret so if I told you, I'd have to kill you (both).

Opening the door and stepping into the darkness, surrounded by a constellation of flashing green lights; the heavy whirr of power supplies and the drone of the servers ringing in my ears, I could almost understand why CTOs get so excited about their kit... almost. Trip a wire and half of Germany's web sites could be taken offline: whoops, there goes Munich.

Returning to The Matrix, there’s a point in the second film where the wise councillor is talking to our wooden hero - you know, one of the pretentious bits of cod philosophising that punctuate the general, gratuitous violence throughout the trilogy. Anyway, the point is that we all take machines for granted - we don’t care how they work as long as they do their job and keep us warm, wake us up in the morning, get us to work, give us drinkable water, and so on. Well, that’s perhaps nowhere more true than in our attitude towards the internet. Who knows or cares about the vast server farms dotted around the world that enable us to book our summer holidays, watch that TV programme we missed, or read our favourite news site for IT managers? Yet these systems are paddling furiously under the surface to keep us happy, and to keep firms online and visible 24x7.