What is a server?

A server could be a person that brings food to your talble at a restaurant. But in the language of the internet it is the computer that brings websites to your home.

Servers come in all shapes and sizes much like cars and trucks. Some can hold more information and some are built for speed. Servers can cost between $200 and $200,000.00 for a single server.

That is a very large range and the ability of a cheap server will never match the high end high priced servers.

Lets look at a low end server, the one most people can afford.

Most cheap servers are nothing more than a standard home computer. Take the computer you are using to view this page, add some webserver software and you have a server.

And what is wrong with that?

Well, for one thing if you try to run several programs at the same time, your computer slows down and in most cases crashing at some point and needing to be rebooted. If you try to run a website and many people are using it at the same time than it will slow down and probably crash needed a reboot.

You can actually sustain a resonable load on a home computer if you use a stable operating system like unix. It is not unreasonable to have 200 or 300 simultaneous users on your website using a cheap $200 to $800 home computer.

But lets look at web hosting. A hosting company cannot set up a $800 computer manage it and sell you space for $20, unless they put multiple people on the same machine. And that is exactly what they do. In most cases you will get a website on a server with between 50 and 200 other websites.

Now look at the server if each website only has 1 visitor, the machine is stressed and reaching its limit.

Obviosly companies like ebay could never use cheap servers because they would crash and they would never be able to let millions of viewers reach pages. So they buy servers with up to 64 processors, essentially 64 of your home computers stacked together in one package.

They also use many more hard drives. Since one drive can only deliver information at a slow rate, they need hundreds of drives that can access data individually.

So a web server is realy nothing more than your home computer with software that allows it to function as a web server. But in most cases, web servers are much more powerful and more expensive than the average computer.

It is like comparing a Toyota pickup with a Giant Dump Truck. They are both trucks, but the bigger one can 100 times more than the smaller one. There is a need for both trucks and each has a place on the internet.

Servers come in all shapes and sizes, prices and abilities. But the technology is much the same as any home computer.