what is web server

 web server

what is a web server a web page is a collection of raw materials ranging from images that text files the database content all sitting out on a computer somewhere on the internet a web server is a piece of software that runs on that same computer and when you ask for a web page the web server puts all those raw materials together into a web page and then sends it back out over the Internet to your web browser I'm looking at a web page here just a very normal page and right here in the address bar it says wpg org when I type that in and hit enter my browser sends a request out across the internet to another machine somewhere and that machine has a piece of software on it kolja web server and that piece of software knows how to take the request gather the right information and send it back to my browser and then I have a web page for the most part people building web sites don't need to think about web servers anymore that's been commoditized pretty much 

 web server

every host anywhere will already have a web server installed and configured for you however if you're really interested and learning how they work you can get a machine on the internet without a web server and install your own and experiment with it the two most common ones are Apache and nginx Apache for many many years more than 20 it's extremely powerful and has many many people working on it nginx is much newer it's much smaller but it's much much faster so if you're looking for power and flexibility and you need to do a variety of things Apache may be what you want to look at however if you just want something to get webpages out the door as fast as possible nginx might be the one for you now if you want to experiment with these I recommend getting a piece of software called local by flywheel local is a web server package that you can download and install on your own computer it works in Windows and Mac and you'll note right 

 web server

here that you can hot swap between nginx or Apache 2.4 this makes it extremely cheap and easy to experiment with both common web servers and if you break it you simply delete local and reinstall and everything is back to the way it was so to reiterate a web server is a piece of software that sits on a computer somewhere else on the Internet and serves up webpages generally you don't need to know about them but if you want to you can download who install like local by flywheel an experiment with both Apache and nginx once you understand how they work you can easily get a job as a system administrator configuring these for any of the hundreds of thousands of hosts that are on the Internet or perhaps get a job with a company that runs their own servers in-house