Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Business Industries Finance Tax

Home > Web server


The term web server can mean one of two things:
  1. a computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers;
  2. a software program that is working as a daemon serving web documents.

Every web server (sense 1) is running a web server program (sense 2).

The most common web or HTTP server programs are:

The most commonly-used web server program, Apache, with over 67% of market share as of October 2004, is available from the Apache Software Foundation.

See Web server software for a comprehensive list of HTTP server programs.

1 Common features

Although web server programs differ in detail, they all share some basic common features. Every web server program operates by accepting HTTP requests from the network, and providing an HTTP response to the requester. The HTTP response typically consists of an HTML document, but can also be a raw text file, an image, or some other type of document.

Usually these documents are stored on the web server's local file system. Both URLs and local filenames have a hierarchical structure, and the server maps the URL onto the local file system in a simple way. When web server software is installed and configured, the server administrator specifies a local pathname as the root from which the server software should locate files. For example, suppose we are configuring server software to provide HTTP service on a server whose IP addressAn IP address is a unique number, akin to a telephone number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet using the Internet Protocol. This allows machines passing the information onwards on be is example.funnycorp.com. We might set the server software's root directory to /home/public/web/. Then, if a web user enters the URL http://example.funnycorp.com/lips/raspberry.html, the web server software running on the host example.funnycorp.com will retrieve the requested content from the file /home/public/web/lips/raspberry.html.

2 See also

3 External links

System softwareSystem software is a generic term referring to any computer software whose purpose is to help run the computer system. Most of it responsible directly for controlling, integrating, and managing the individual hardware components of a computer system. World Wide WebThe World Wide Web (the Web or WWW for short) is a distributed hypertext system that operates over the Internet. Basic terms Hypertext is viewed using a program called a web browser which retrieves pieces of information, called "documents" or " web pages" Computer terminology



Non User