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Wolf Web Solutions Customer Support How Web Host Servers Work. |
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To serve up pages, Web sites need a host - a computer and server software that is connected to the Internet 24hrs a day. The host manages the communications protocols and house the pages and the related software required to create a Web site on the Internet. The host machine often uses UNIX, Windows NT or Macintosh operating systems. UNIX is by the far the most used operating sytem on the Internet today. The server resides on the host machine and serves up pages and otherwise acts on the requests sent from client browser software. (Netscape, Internet Explorer). There are different types of server software (database servers or network servers, for example) that perform different types of services for different types of clients. Specifically, a Web server is an HTTP server and its function is to send information to the client software, (typically a browser) using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Usually, the client browser requests that the server return an HTML document. The server receives this request and sends back a response. The top portion of the response includes transmission information and the rest of the response is the HTML file. A Web server does more than send pages to the browser. It passes requests to run CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts to the CGI applications. These scripts run external mini-programs, such as a database lookup or interactive forms processing. The server sends the script to the application via CGI and communicates the results of the script back to the browser, if appropriate. The server software includes configuration files and utilities to secure and manage the Web site in a variety of ways. |