{"id":5582,"date":"2019-07-20T07:00:39","date_gmt":"2019-07-20T07:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ssdnodes.com\/blog\/?p=2511"},"modified":"2025-07-16T15:07:27","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T15:07:27","slug":"what-is-a-web-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/blog\/what-is-a-web-server\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is A Web Server?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you\u2019re like most people, you\u2019ve probably don\u2019t spend much time thinking about where websites come from.<\/b><\/p>\n

After all, if you were born in the 90\u2019s or later, the web has always just <\/span>been there<\/span><\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

And even if you're older, you've probably accepted the internet as an essential part of your life by now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most people certainly don\u2019t think of a website as data...<\/span><\/p>\n

...and they probably don\u2019t think of web servers, ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

But web servers are the reason that data ends up as perfectly-placed pixels on your iPhone. Without them, there wouldn\u2019t be any websites as we know them.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, in this article, we\u2019re going to talk about web servers.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

What is a web server? How do they work? And which ones are most popular?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

And then we\u2019ll guide you to some resources you can use if you\u2019re looking to set up a web server for yourself on your VPS.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is a web server?<\/b><\/h2>\n

A web server is a computer running software that accepts and respond to <\/span>World Wide Web<\/span><\/a> client requests. The computer (server) stores all the info needed for a website, and the software processes requests and sends the requested document to the website\u2019s visitors using Internet protocols.<\/span><\/p>\n

Web servers use the <\/span>HTTP<\/span> (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) protocol to serve files and web pages in response to a request from a user via an <\/span>HTTP<\/span> client (usually a web browser like Google Chrome or Safari).<\/span><\/p>\n

The web server typically runs all the time to serve a client\u2019s request in various outputs like <\/span>HTML<\/span>, <\/span>XHTML<\/span>, and <\/span>XML<\/span>, which are otherwise known as <\/span>web pages<\/b>. Before serving web pages to the client, it needs to collect some other resources, like <\/span>CSS<\/span> or <\/span>JavaScript<\/span>files, images and fonts.<\/span><\/p>\n

How does a web server work?<\/b><\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s talk about how a web server works. But before we talk about how a web server works, we need to understand the term <\/span>URL<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is a URL?<\/b><\/h3>\n

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a unique address for a file that\u2019s stored on a web server.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The file may be an <\/span>HTML<\/span> file, a <\/span>CSS<\/span> file, an image file, or any other file related to a web page, and is referred to as a <\/span>resource<\/b> for a web server.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A URL has the following elements:<\/span><\/p>\n