What is a Web Server?
You may be familiar with network servers, especially if you work in a computer-dependent environment. A Web server performs much the same way a network servers does, except it serves up data to a much broader audience than one office or company. It allows you to display a website to the general public via the Internet.
You may own a Web server, although it’s much more common for website publishers to effectively “rent” servers from hosting providers. You’ll also find several types of Web servers available to you, each with its own benefits and limitations.
How Does a Web Server Work?
In the most basic terms, a Web server communicates with your computer in order to display data. The information is stored on the server, and by typing a string of characters in a specific order into your browser, you request information, and the server “serves” it up.
The actual process is, of course, much more complex. What’s probably most amazing, though, is that the time that lapses between your typing an address into your browser and the correct information appearing in front of you is mere milliseconds, even if the server is thousands of miles away from you.
When you type a URL into a browser, the browser breaks it down into two parts:
- The protocol – http or https
- The server name – www.yoursite.com or simply yoursite.com
A possible third part exists if you’re accessing a specific page of a website rather than its home page. This would be the file name, and could look something like this:
- news-article.htm
So the entire URL would be:
- http://www.yoursite.com/news-article.htm
The browser communicates with a domain name server, and translates the URL into an IP address, which allows it to connect to the server. The browser then connects to the server that resides at that IP address.
The browser follows the HTTP protocol to send a GET request to the server, requesting the file specified by the URL address you entered into the browser’s address bar. The server responds by sending HTML text for that page to your browser. The HTML tags incorporated into the text provide the formatting that determines how the page will appear on your computer screen.
Once the page appears, you can interact with it, and every time you change the address in your browser, the process starts all over again.
Web Server Types
Depending on your hosting needs, you have a handful of server options to choose from, which also correlate to the type of hosting you can select.
Shared Server
These are physical servers able to accommodate anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand websites, shared servers are most often associated with one of the less-expensive types of hosting.
Because each website on the shared server must, as the name suggests, share resources including bandwidth and storage space, shared hosting will usually cost less than other types of hosting.
Virtual Private Server
While still technically a server, a virtual private server (VPS) is not a physical piece of hardware. It’s actually a server environment created by software, and existing within the storage space of a physical server. A VPS offers benefits a shared server doesn’t, such as heightened security and more freely available resources.
However, it doesn’t offer quite as many features as a dedicated server. It’s usually a good choice for a medium-sized business that needs more than a shared server can offer, but isn’t quite ready to graduate to a dedicated server yet.
Dedicated Server
Exactly as its name suggests, a dedicated server is dedicated to just one user. Like other servers, it’s still capable of hosting more than one website. Because the server is dedicated to that one account, though, all its resources go toward supporting the account.
Not having to share the server’s resources with other users means the websites hosted on the dedicated server will likely run better, have faster page load times, and have more storage and bandwidth. Using a dedicated server is usually more expensive than using either a shared server or a VPS server.
Managed Server
Technically, a managed server isn’t so much an actual server as it is a type of service offered by hosting providers. This service usually doesn’t apply to shared servers, but is reserved for VPS servers, dedicated servers, and a few other types. Basically, it entails technicians employed by the hosting provider seeing to both the physical and virtual needs of the server.
They make sure the equipment is in good working order, and perform repairs when necessary. They also manage the server’s resources, ensuring the appropriate amount of disk space and bandwidth is consistently provided, and that installed apps run the way they’re supposed to. Depending on the extent of the server management, it may also include app and software installation.
Cloud Server
Much like virtual private servers, cloud servers are not physical pieces of equipment, but virtualized server environments. In the case of cloud servers, though, they run on a cloud computing environment, which basically means a number of computers connected to each other via a real-time communication network, such as the Internet. All of the computers in a cloud network contain the same information.
This redundancy means that if one (or two, or five) of the networked computers goes down, the other computers will continue to provide the same information, thereby avoiding a loss of data, or any downtime. This concept also applies to cloud servers. If one goes down, the site or sites hosted on it will not experience downtime because the other servers in the cloud will compensate.
Colocated Server
Some website publishers prefer to own their servers rather than rent them from hosting providers. They will often store those servers in data centers, using the center’s resources (electricity, cooling, bandwidth, etc.), but reaping the benefit of being a dedicated server whose virtual resources are confined to one user.
A colocated server is one of the servers housed in such a data center, the name coming from the fact that the servers are all located in the same place.
Which type of Web server you choose depends greatly upon factors such as what kind of site you wish to place on the server, how much traffic you get (or expect to get), and how large your site is (or will become).