How Webservers Work?
Everytime, you open a browser and type in http://www.eukhost.com, have you ever thought about the process which helped the browser display the website? Has it every crossed your mind that there is a complex system which supports this activity? Here is a brief explanation of the methodology behind this easy-to-use, but difficult-to make-it-work process.
More often than not, users access a website by typing in the domain name in their browser, or from a hyperlink that brings them to the website. Lets take eukhost.com as a case-study. You open a browser and type http://www.eukhost.com into the address bar. Your browser then initiates a connection to the webserver in which the eukhost.com files are stored. The browser does this using the internet connection you have. The request for http://eukhost.com is first converted into an IP address using the nameservers which have been assigned to eukhost.com and then locating the server which has eukhost’s files.
Once communicaton has been established between the browser and the webserver; a request for the files of eukhost.com to be displayed is made. This is done using the hyper text transfer protocol (http). All the files which the webserver sends back to the browser is then converted into human readable format by the web-browser itself. Using this very process, the server can send files to multiple client computers at the same time allowing viewers across the globe to access the website.
A webserver typically stores all the files necessary to display eukhost.com’s pages in your web browser. This includes all the text files, images, graphics, video files, audio files and any other script that enables the dynamic elements of a website to function. The number of such simultaneous requests which can be serviced depends entirely on the robustness and configuration of the webserver.
The most popular open-source webserver in use today is Apache, while windows servers generally use IIS (Internet Information Services) as their webserver application.
