Whenever we open a website, it is downloaded from a web server. Whatever information is available on the Internet to us, it is actually provided by the Web Servers. There are a number of web servers as each and every website exists on a web server only.

What is a Web Server?
A web server is actually quite a powerful computer with better processors and more memory as compared to the normal computers. It generally runs on an Unix or Linux operating system but can run on Windows as well.

However, the ability of a computer to be used as a server does not depend on its hardware but the software that it make use of. It includes the HTTP server along with the databases and other things that are required to make a web server work in a proper manner.

Types of Servers
There are basically three types of web servers, depending upon the way they work. These are:

Microsoft servers: Few Microsoft servers such as Internet Information Server, or IIS and Personal Web Server, also called PWS together constitute around 20 percent of the market share.

Sun servers: The most popular Sun's server is Netscape. The percentage market share of these servers is as low as 3-4 percent and even less if you count the actively maintained ones.

Apache: It is the most popular server software that comprise around 70 percent of the market share.

Virtual Servers and Dedicated Servers
When you pay for web hosting, that does not mean that you hire an entire server for yourself. You will be sharing it with the other customers. However, these customers are hidden from each other. Each one is given a virtual server, and it looks as if everyone make the use of their own servers.

Virtual servers are the only option for the small websites. It is actually a good way to share the resources among the small websites that do not use much space or power. However, if even one of the websites begins to grow, the other ones would slow down considerably. Hence, it is better to find a web host which offers limited space at an affordable price as compared to one that offers unlimited space and bandwidth to its customers.

Web Servers Run Scripts
Insertion of any information into the web pages, such as the ones that comes from databases is done by the use of scripting languages such as PHP or Perl. The server is given a command to hand over the files ending with .php or .pl to the appropriate interpreter. Then depending on it, the interpreters send the right files to the browsers. Due to the fact that the server has to produce different pages for every individual visitor, the dynamic websites are quite slow.