WEB SERVER

What is the first thing comes to your mind if someone asks you about a web server? well, If we simply break the term, it would mean a server which is responsible for providing web content.

A web server can be one of the following:

A Computer program which delivers web content using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) over the world wide web (www).

A Computer or virtual machine which runs the program of delivering web content.

Let us look at the most common features of a web server.

FEATURES OF WEB SERVER

1. Virtual Hosting: It is a method in which a computer with a single IP address is used for hosting multiple domain names. This allows a machine to share its process cycles, memory, and even data quite easily with others. Shared web hosting is one of the most popular applications of the virtual Hosting since it allows multiple clients to be hosted on a single server.

USES OF VIRTUAL HOSTING

Usually Virtual web Hosting is used to Corporate MNCs whose business models are designed to provide affordable websites hosting to their customers across the globe. In most of the cases, the client's websites and web-data are hosted on shared servers using Virtual Hosting technology.

Sometimes large companies require this technology for their internal business purpose as well. If daily working involves huge utilization of customer extranet websites, employee extranet and internal intranet for various departments, then all the web data can  easily be merged into a single server within the organization using Virtual Web Hosting. This would not only save management risks administrative concerns, but also reduce the number of individual server needed to support such a business model.

2. Bandwidth Throttling: Let us first Understand the meaning of throttle. In simple English term, it signifies a mechanism which is used to restrict the flow of a fluid by constriction or obstruction. Similarly, bandwidth throttling is a mechanism or method which is used to limit the quantity of data being transmitted or accepted within a specific interval of time. A Server is an efficient bandwidth intensive device.

Let us Understand the Concept in brief:

A web server is a host computer which is connected to internet and provides the data as desired by the client. It is quite obvious that the flow of data is not uniform across the day. It might peak and fall at a specific interval of time. During high inflow of data requests, there can be massive congestion of data which lead to request being timed out, delay in server response, and sometimes a server crash. A simple way to void such  scenario is the implementation of bandwidth throttling to control the number of requests being sent to the server in a given interval of time. A computer administrator can set a realistic figure and test the server response.

Once the server reaches a bandwidth limit, the mechanism of bandwidth throttling will block any further data request attempts. Such requests will be lined up in a queue and processed once the bandwidth eases out again. Similarly, most of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network programs, like BitTorrent have inbuilt bandwidth throttling features which allow us to set the maximum upload and download limit.

A Common examples of such a scenario is the day when ICSE and CBSE result are declared. The official website is subjected to thousands of requests per seconds which leads to delayed response and requests being timed out. You are unable to view your result instantly. Once the time passes and there is a gradual decrease in the number of data requests, the web server again regains its efficiency. Bandwidth throttling is used in heavy servers so as to avoid the worst scenario of a complete server crash which happened in a few places during the 2009-10 Common Admission Test (CAT) Examinations.

3. Large File Support: Most of you might have come across them, a 32-bit operating system and a 64-bit operating system. How many of you can know the exact meaning of such a term? Let us Understand it logically.

A 32-bit operating system simply means that it will use 32-bit integers to represent the file size and its storage position in the system. Since we use only signed numbers to represents the size, a 32-bit operating system is capable of representing a file properly whose maximum size is 2"31 bytes. If you have a file whose size is larger than 2"31 bytes (2 GB), then it will not have  a proper representation. Hence, in the year 1996, an industrial initiative was launched by multiple vendors to tackle this problems. This initiative is popularly known as the Large File Summit (or ability to support Large File Size). From that point onward, a standardized way of defining the file size was switched to 64-bit numbers. Hence, even a 32-bit operating system can easily store a single file of size greater than 2GB with complete information.

A web server follows the same standardized pattern and helps us to save huge files with complete details.