How Server Hardware, Software and Protocols Work

Basically what a server is, is hardware, software and protocols working together. Here is some info about how they work and what they do.

Server Hardware:

The server hardware is very similar to your old PC hardware so that the price of server hardware today has come down to almost nothing. This makes it very tempting for a lot of us to host our own servers, but if you want high uptime and stability on your server you should choose a host that...

A server today is and should be:

A fast processor

Some gigabytes of disk space

Large amount of RAM

Good connection, preferred T1 line or higher.

Server hardware today is housed in large office buildings. They are often in large climate controlled rooms where there is many racks of servers together. Usually it is big companies offering server host to the public that owns the hardware servers. They often have 99% uptime or higher on their servers, something that is very impressive and that makes it a good reason to choose a server host instead of hosting it yourself. How often do you reboot your computer? With a server host you do not have to think about that.

Software (The Operating System)

There is many different operating systems on the market. If you got a server host you most likely is running Apache on Linux on your server. That is a open source product. Servers needs to be secured and not much buggy, and an open source application is more likely to be that. You could also be using Microsoft's Windows systems on your server, but this is not open source and does cost money, and that is the reason why most server hosts today are using Apache on Linux as software instead.

However, even if you use Windows or Linux, the server systems is using an interface for you to access and configure, also called a control panel. Some control panels are more complicated to handle then others. If you are not very technical, this should be a concern when picking a server host.

Protocol (FTP)

To get pages on your server from your computer you will need to FTP them (File Transfer Protocol). FTP is an client-server application, which means you transfer files from for your computer to your server. You can also share files from your own computer to someone else computer with FTP.

Well this was a simple overview of what a server host is and does, but it should give you some basic ideas on how it works.