A web server is a number of large computers, known as servers, housed in an air-conditioned server house known as a data centre where they are connected to a highly efficient, fault-tolerance high-speed internet connection.
Web servers are able to handle hundreds of thousands of requests a second and can return back this information quickly, providing the visitor of a website with the information they were looking for in no time at all.
It is big business to keep servers online – this is called uptime and it is the measurement of how long as server is online and functional for during the period of a month, or year. A lot of hosting companies boast their servers have 99.9% uptime, which means 99.9% of the time (per month) their servers are online and functional, meaning all websites hosted on their servers will be working.
There are many different types of web server available, such as dedicated servers, load balancing servers, database servers and many more. If you’re just starting out on the web and need the basic type of web server, look out for fully managed shared hosting, which means the hosting company maintains the server you’re on, along with the other people that share it. Its often the cheapest solution if you’re a beginner.
