What is a server?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. The word server gets thrown around a lot.
We hear about web servers, print servers, mail servers.
But what in the heck is a server?
Well, if we take the word apart, it's a computer that serves. What does that mean?
Well, it's just nothing more than
a computer, honestly, often very similar to the one you're
already using that serves up services or resources to other computers.
There's nothing really special about it.
It may be configured for certain things.
We'll talk about that in a second.
But the bottom line is that even in your
own home, if your computer is configured to share its files using file sharing or
you've got a folder that's shared out or even a printer connected to your computer
that is shared for other computers on your local network to use.
Yes, your machine is a server.
It's serving up either files or it's serving up a printer.
It's a print server, or it's a file server, but it's your computer.
There's nothing really special about it.
However, just because your machine is a server
doesn't really mean that it's a good server.
That's where things get a little bit more nuanced.
For example, Ask Leo lives on a server.
It's a PC that lives in the cloud.
It's actually an Amazon Web Services.
But the bottom line is that it's optimized for doing its job really well.
It basically has no display.
It is optimized for fast Internet transfer because that's its job is to serve up
files the website to you as quickly and as responsibly as possible.
It's a bad print server because there's nothing connected to it.
But it's a really good web server because it's been configured.
It's been optimized for serving up web pages.
Your ISP's mail server is just another
computer that has been optimized to serve up mail.
Now, that does mean that it may not have
as fast a web connection, but it may have multiple connections so
that it connect to multiple different places at the same time.
It may be optimized differently with different amounts of Ram,
different amounts of disk, because it could be storing a tremendous
amount of email for a long period of time, whereas my web server generally does not.
So that's the idea is that in Internet parlance, when you talk about the servers
that are being used to provide you the services you use email,
websites, file sharing, and more it's really not a lot more than
just a PC or a PC equivalent optimized for that specific task.
Optimizing doesn't even have to be that heavy.
Like I said, almost any PC will do.
But especially when you get to services that are being delivered across
the Internet by large companies or even escalate, the server is optimized to make
sure that it can do the job it's intended for as best it can.
Now, there is one other I'll just call it a variation on the term that is
also somewhat or perhaps less important to understand.
If you are in the process of finding your
own web server, you have your own website that you want to put on the internet.
There's a common terminology for dedicated or shared servers.
What that means is nothing more than what those words imply.
A dedicated server is a PC or a virtual PC that is dedicated entirely to you,
your website, whatever you want to do to it, that's how my asclio actually runs.
I have a server whose job it is to do asclio and only asclio as best it can.
On the other hand, there are what are called shared servers.
What that means is that your website may not need an entire computer virtually.
You don't get a lot of traffic.
Maybe you don't have many web pages.
Maybe it's just a parking page. Who knows?
Bottom line is that you don't need the power or the expense of an entire
server dedicated to what it is you're doing.
That's what shared hosting Shared servers are all about.
They actually put multiple websites on the same hardware on one PC.
As it turns out, depending on the service
you happen to be using for your hosting, a single PC could be a very big PC,
highly optimized to serving up lots and lots of different websites.
It could host a couple of thousand different websites on a single machine.
Hopefully they've got it backed up.
But the idea is that you are sharing a server with other people.
It kind of looks like you're in your own
little world when you're interacting with your site and when you're managing
your site, but in reality you're sharing the hardware with a bunch of other people.
That's really all that server and dedicated versus shared really means.
It's just a PC, a different way of looking
at a PC and a different way of understanding how a PC is being used.
For comments for updates, for related links and more,
visit AskLeo.com/1902. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com.
Thanks for watching.