Web Technology - Old Questions

10.  What is Web server software? Discuss its role on the Internet.

5 marks | Asked in 2075

Web server is a program or a computer that can provide services to other programs called clients. A web server can contain one or more websites. A web server processes the incoming requests.

  • The primary function of web server is to store, process and deliver web pages to clients. The communication between client and server takes place using the HTTP. Pages delivered are most frequently HTML documents, which ,may include images, style sheets.
  • A web browser initiates the communication by making a request for a specific resources using HTTP and the server responds with the content of that resources or an error message if unable to do so.

Role of web server:

1. Stores and secures website data: In web hosting services, a web server stores all website data and secures it from unauthorized users when it is properly configured.

2. Provides web database access: A web server’s responsibility is to provide access to websites that are hosted. Web hosting service providers own some web servers that are used in variable ways to provide different web hosting services, such as backend database servers.

3. Serve the end user requests: Web servers accept requests from different users connected over the internet and serve them accordingly.

4. Bandwidth controlling to regulate network traffic: It is a feature available in web server to minimize excess network traffic. Web Hosts can set bandwidth values to regulate the rate of data transmission over the internet. This feature avoids the down time caused by high web traffic.

5. Virtual hosting: Virtual Hosting is a type of web hosting service in which a web server is used to host other software based virtual web-servers web sites, data, applications and other services. Virtualized Web servers do possess this feature to provide virtual hosting.

6. Server side web scripting: This feature of web server enables the user to create dynamic web pages. The popular server side scripting languages include Perl, Ruby, Python, PHPandASP etc