Understanding a Web Server and Types of Web Servers

Understanding a Web Server and Types of Web Servers

Web server is used to store, process, and deliver web pages to the user's communication using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Program It is the program used to provide files that produce web pages for users in response to their requests that are sent by the HTTP clients of their computer.

Types of Web Servers Mainly there are the following types of web servers Apache , IIS, Nginx, and LiteSpeed.

Apache Web Server

Apache webserver is developed by Apache Software Foundation. It is the most popular and open-source software web server. Apache supports all operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Unix FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and more. Around 60% of devices run on this web server.

Apache webserver is modular in structure so that it is easy to customize.

As it is open-source, it added your modules when you want to make changes to adjust your requirements.

IIS Web Server

IIS Web Server is developed by Microsoft. It covers all features offered by Apache. As it is not opensource software, it is unmanageable to add modules and modify them.

It supports all the platforms for Windows operating system. Also, provide good customer support if needed.

Nginx Web Server

Nginx is also an open-source web server after Apache. It includes of IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Nginx provides high performance, stability, simple configuration, and low resource usage.

Nginx Web Server is used by many web hosting companies. Nginx has not used any threads to handle the requests as an alternately a highly scalable event-driven architecture is used to a utilized small and predictable amount of memory under load.

LiteSpeed Web Server

LiteSpeed (LSWS) is the top 4th popular web server as a commercial web server on the internet. It is the best replacement for the Apache.

By upgrading the webserver to LiteSpeed it will experience improved performance that also with lowering operating costs.

LiteSpeed server offers the features such as .htaccess, mod_rewrite, and mod_security that are compatible with Apache.

It is able to load Apache configuration files directly and work as a drop-in replacement Apache with almost all the hosting control panels.

LiteSpeed can substitute the Apache within 15 minutes without any downtime.

LiteSpeed can replace all the Apache functions. However, other front-end proxy solutions can not simplify the use and make the transition from Apache smooth and easy.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java servlet container uses as a web server. It is a Java program that expands the capabilities of a server is called a Java servlet. Servlets are usually responding to any type of request but they most commonly implement applications hosted on web servers. These web servlets are Java equivalent to other dynamic web content technologies such as PHP and ASP.NET. Sun Microsystems donated Tomcat’s codebase to the Apache Software Foundation in 1999 presently became a top-level Apache project in 2005. Apache Tomcat powers just under just 1% of all websites.

Apache Tomcat is listed with other open-source Java application servers. Examples are Wildfly, JBoss, and Glassfish.

Node.js

Node.js is primary a server-side JavaScript context and it is used for the network applications like web servers. It was first written by Ryan Dahl in 2009.

Node.js is having a smaller market and it runs 0.2% of all websites. It is the Node.js project, managed by the Node.js Foundation and assisted by the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects program.

A cross-platform runtime environment for building network applications makes Node.js different from other popular web servers. An event-driven structure is applied by Node.js which is capable of asynchronous I/O. Due to these design choices, throughput and scalability are optimized in web applications which helps to run real-time communication and browser games. Node.js also helps in understanding the variety in web development stacks, where Node.js is simply part of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript stack, as opposed to Apache or NGINX which are a part of several different software stacks. Node.js hosting is an open-source server that runs on many different platforms.

Lighttpd

Lighttpd was released in March 2003 with its first version. It currently runs around 0.1% of all websites and is classified under a BSD license.

Due to its small CPU load, low memory footprint, and speed optimizations Lighttpd stands unique.

Lighttpd uses an event-driven architecture and is optimized for a large number of parallel connections, and supports FastCGI, Auth, Output-compression, SCGI, URL-rewriting, and many more features.

It is a commonly used web server for the web frameworks like Catalyst and Ruby on Rails.

There are also some other types of servers are available as below: Mail Server Mail server offers a centrally located pool of disk space to store and share different documents in the form of emails for network users.

Mail servers used a single location to store the data so that administrators need to backup files only from one computer.

Application Server The application server is a set of elements that can be accessed by the software developer via an API defined by the platform itself. These elements are usually performed in an environment similar to its web server(s) for the web applications.

It mainly works to support the development of dynamic pages.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Server FTP is used for separate control and data connections in-between the client and the server.

FTP users can authorize themselves in the form of a username and password.

FTP can also connect with anonymous names if permission is given by the server.

For secure transmission, the username and password should be encrypted using the FTP and SSL.

Database Server When a computer program offers database services to other computers with the feature of client-server functionality is called a database server. Those are some DBMSs (example: MySQL) that depends upon the client-server model for accessing the database.

Domain Name System (DNS) Server It is the computer server that allows hosts a network service for offering responses to queries is known as a name server. It maps either an addressing element or numeric identification. It is done by the server to give a response to a network service protocol request.

The DNS servers primarily translate the human-memorable domain names and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Also, it helps to remember a namespace on the internet and is used to find out or locate the computer systems and resources on the Internet.

Concluding…

All web hosting companies primarily select the web servers depends on the demand of clients, the number of clients on a single server, the applications/software clients use, and the amount of traffic a web server can handle generated by the clients.

So, while selecting a web server first of all think about all these aspects and then select one.