Web Server — Functionality & Types
What is a Web Server??? What does it do???
The basic objective of the web-server is to store, process, and deliver web pages to the users. The term web server can refer to hardware or software, or both of them working together.
On the hardware side, a web server is a computer that stores web server software and web pages, and their supporting files (HTML documents, images, style sheets, test, etc) are available on that computer.
On the software side, a web server includes several parts that control how web users access hosted files. At a minimum, this is an HTTP server. An HTTP server can be accessed through the domain names of the websites it stores, and it delivers the content of these hosted websites to the end user’s device. Besides HTTP, web servers also support SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), used for email, file transfer, and storage.
If we hear someone say, “My website is not responding”, it actually means that the web-server is not responding and therefore the website is not available.
Types of Web Servers???
There are mainly four types of web servers:
- Apache,
- IIS (Internet Information Services),
- Nginx and
- LiteSpeed.
Apache web-server:
Apache web server is one of the most popular open-source web servers developed by the Apache Software Foundation. It supports almost all the operating system such as Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Unix FreeBSD, etc. It can be customized due to its modular structure. It is highly suitable as compared to other web servers. The administrative issue on it can be resolved easily. About 60% of the web server machines run the Apache Web Server.
IIS(Internet Information Services) web-server:
IIS is a Microsoft product and it offers all the features such as apache. But it’s not open-source so adding personal modules as well as modifying becomes a bit difficult. It supports all the platform that runs windows OS also we can get good customers to support if there is an issue.
Nginx web-server:
After Apache, Nginx is the next open source web server. It provides high performance, stability, simple configuration, and low resource uses. No threads are used to handle the requests by Nginx. Approximately 7.5% of all the domains are hosted by Nginx globally. Many web hosting companies have started this server.
LiteSpeed web-server:
Light speed is a commercial web server and it is the 4th popular web server on the internet. This service is compatible with most common Apache features such as mod_rewrite, .htaccess, and mod_security. It has the ability to load apache configuration files directly and work as a drop-in replacement Apache with almost all the hosting control panels. It can replace the Apache within 15 minutes without any downtime.
Some more web servers are:-
lighttpd (pronounced ‘Lightly’):
Lighttpd is also a free web server that is distributed with the FreeBSD operating system. This open-source web server is fast, secure, and consumes much less CPU power. Lighttpd can also run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. It currently runs approximately 0.1% of websites.
Node JS:
Node JS was originally written by Ryan Dahl in 2009. It is basically a server-side JavaScript environment that is used for network applications such as web servers. Having a small market position Node JS runs 0.2% of all websites. Node JS differs from other popular web servers because it is mainly a cross-platform runtime environment for building network applications. An event-driven architecture is applied by Node JS which is capable of asynchronous Input/Output.
Jigsaw Server:
Jigsaw (W3C’s Server) comes from the World Wide Web Consortium. It is open-source and free and can run on various platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X Free BSD, etc. Jigsaw has been written in Java and can run CGI scripts and PHP programs.
Sun Java System Web Server:
This web-server from Sun Microsystems is suited for medium and large websites. It is a multi-threaded and multi-process web server that provides high performance, scalability, and reliability to enterprises. It also provides data security and command-line interface CLI support.
References:
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/web_developers_guide/web_server_types.html
https://www.milesweb.in/blog/hosting/web-server-types-web-servers/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Common_questions/What_is_a_web_server
