Welcome
Servers For Sale – What is a Server?
FEATURED ARTICLE:
A server computer is a computer, or series of computers, that link other computers or electronic devices together. They often provide essential services across a network, either to private users inside a large organization or to public users via the internet. For example, when you enter a query in a search engine, the query is sent from your computer over the internet to the servers that store all the relevant web pages. The results are sent back by the server to your computer.
Many servers have dedicated functionality such as web servers, print servers, and database servers. Enterprise servers are servers that are used in a business context.
The term server is used quite broadly in information technology. Despite the many server-branded products available (such as server editions of hardware, software or operating systems), in theory any computerised process that shares a resource to one or more client processes is a server. To illustrate this, take the common example of file sharing. While the existence of files on a machine does not classify it as a server, the mechanism which shares these files to clients by the operating system is the server.
Similarly, consider a web server application (such as the multiplatform “Apache HTTP Server”). This web server software can be run on any capable computer. For example, while a laptop or personal computer is not typically known as a server, they can in these situations fulfill the role of one, and hence be labelled as one. It is in this case that the machine’s purpose as a web server classifies it in general as a server.
In the hardware sense, the word server typically designates computer models intended for hosting software applications under the heavy demand of a network environment. In this client–server configuration one or more machines, either a computer or a computer appliance, share information with each other with one acting as a host for the other.
While nearly any personal computer is capable of acting as a network server, a dedicated server will contain features making it more suitable for production environments. These features may include a faster CPU, increased high-performance RAM, and typically more than one large hard drive. More obvious distinctions include marked redundancy in power supplies, network connections, and even the servers themselves.
