List of Top 5 Web servers in 2021

What is web server ?

A web server is software and hardware that uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, known as HTTP, and other protocols that respond to request from clients that is being made on the World Wide Web. The main work is that the webserver performs is to display the content of the website, which it does by storing, then processing, and eventually delivering the webpages to the user who has requested it.

Basic representation of a client/server connection through HTTP

 Types of the web server ?

there are mainly four types of web server.

  • Apache Web Server.
  • IIS Web Server.
  • Nginx Web Server.
  • LiteSpeed Web Server.

Apache Web Server

Apache HTTP server is most commonly used web servers worldwide. The biggest advantage of using this server is that it supports almost all operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Apple Mac OS, Unix, and others. Around 65% of the web server machines worldwide, run the Apache Web Server.

IIS Web Server

IIS (Internet Information Services) is Microsoft’s web server , playing second position to market leader Apache. As is expected of a core Microsoft product, it only runs on Windows operating systems, but is otherwise free for use. It is a closed software product and supported by solely by Microsoft.

Nginx Web Server

Nginx provides high performance in Web servers with heavy scaling. Nginx is able to run at high speeds under massive loads. The reverse proxy feature allows a single site to present all information sources as if they all come from one page. Its load balancer allows loads to be divide among different resources such as servers.

LiteSpeed Web Server

LiteSpeed Web Server can be used to replace an existing Apache server without changing any program or operating system details. And it can be integrated without breaking anything. LiteSpeed Web Server can quickly replace a major bottleneck in your existing web hosting platform.

What are the functions of Web server?

Web Hosting Servers
functions of web server

At first the client’s browser divides the URL into diffrent parts dividing including address, path name and protocol.

After that DNS translates the domain name into the corresponding IP address .the numeric combination represents the site’s true address on the internet.

Then The browser now decides which protocol should be used .a protocol in common parlance is a language which the client’s to communicate with the server. FTP,HTTP are some such protocols.

then The server sends a GET request to the web server to retrieve the address it has been given. It verifies given address exists, finds necessary files ,runs appropriate scripts exchanges cookies if necessary and returns back to the browser.

At last The browser now converts the data into HTML and displays results to the user. If it does not locate it sends an error message to the browser and to the client.

Top 5 Web servers

  1. Apache Web Server

2. IIS Web Server

3. Nginx Web Server

4. LiteSpeed Web Server

5.NodeJs