Web servers for non technical people

The whole internet experience we have daily is possible thanks to web servers.

But what are they? How do they work? Let's dig into them!

A web server is a system that delivers content or services to end users over the internet. When you type in a web address like?www.example.com, your computer contacts the example.com server and requests information.

The server then responds to your browser, sending the website's HTML code, which the browser renders as a web page. It also sends over additional files, like image files, CSS files, and JavaScript ones.

The kinds of content that a web server can deliver are very variable, but to simplify, there are two macro-categories:

• Static content: these are common files that are present in the server and ready to be delivered. For example, an image with the logo of your website;
• Dynamic content: this kind of content does not exist on the server when the request arrives. Instead, it is generated on the fly just for the request the server receives.

Speaking about dynamic content, there are a lot of different ways to let the server generate the answer for a given received request.

Probably you have heard of PHP; it is a programming language much used on the web.?

Its role is to receive the request (that the web server received), to generate the answer based on the code that a developer wrote, and to send it back to the web server (that will deliver it to the browser that made the original request).

There are a lot of programming languages and "ways" to generate dynamic content, but summarizing the process is as simple as that:

1. Your browser makes the request
2. Web server receives it and passes it to the appropriate processor
3. The processor generates the answer and passes it back to the web server
4. The web server sends the answer back to your browser.

That's it; all of this could take just a second or less!

I hope that now it is clear how important web servers are and that you grasp how they work!

This series of articles is dedicated to managers who are not technical but need a quick introduction to technical topics from various subjects to be more aware in their work.

Feel free to propose new topics clicking here!