The Internet

What is a Web Server?

A web server is a program that serves content to the Internet(WWW). The primary function of a web server is to store, process and deliver web pages to clients.

 

The client and server communicate using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP means HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted. Content being transferred is most frequently HTML documents.

 

The Browser

The browser is a software application used to locate, retrieve and display content It interprets code and displays it as a web page.

The user needs to tell the browser what website or specific web page they want.

The DNS

The DNS (Domain Name server) helps locate servers by keeping a list of ip addresses. An IP address is a unique number, like a phone number, that enables the user to locate a website on the Internet. Each website has an ip address. Web servers don't know what google.com is and require the ip address of the website in order to return the desired html page.

 

If you wanted to get a domain for your website for example myfirstwebsite.com you would have to buy the domain and link the ip address to it. The ip address would be assigned to the server that hosts your site.

Working Together

To access a website, enter a URL(Universal Resource Locator) in the browser’s address bar. The browser takes the URL and goes to the DNS to find the ip address The browser makes a request to the web server via HTTP.

The document is returned to the browser.

Apache

Apache is the most widely used web server software. It runs mostly on UNIX-based operating systems with 92% of server copies running on linux distributions. 60% of all Web sites on the Internet are using Apache making it the most widely used web server.