A web server is a software application that, running on a server, is able to manage the transfer requests of a client's web pages, that is a web browser (such as Google Chrome or Firefox).
Before continuing, however, it is essential to make a distinction between the servers that host the websites on the hardware side and the web servers which is a software application.
A server is a computer, local or remote, used to provide one or more users with various types of services at the same time, such as sending emails and managing transfers via FTP. A server can be local, that is accessible only from a home or office network, or remote, accessible from all over the world, without the physical location affecting its accessibility. A web server can simultaneously deliver the contents of a website to many different computers and therefore to the browsers.
The HTTP transfer protocol (or its encrypted variant HTTPS) is used for data transmission, which is based on the network protocols IP and TCP (more rarely UDP). The speed of processing user requests depends on the hardware and server load, but the complexity of web content also plays an important role, because, for example, dynamic content requires more resources than static.
Dynamic pages in addition to HTML use other languages (PHP, ASP, etc.) through which some instructions are defined to generate the content of the requested page. These instructions (in the form of a script) are processed automatically showing the user the dynamically generated content with the appearance predefined by the developer.
Here is a list of the most popular web servers (software):
- Apache HTTP Server (developed by Apache Software Foundation)
- Apache Tomcat (developed by Apache Software Foundation)
- LiteSpeed Web Server
- ColdFusion (by Macromedia, now acquired by Adobe)
- HTTP File Server
- Internet Information Services (IIS, developed by Microsoft)
- lighttpd
- Nginx
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