What is a Server?

If you spend any amount of time on the internet, you’ve heard of the word server. Not the server or waiter from a restaurant but as a computer term. If you’ve ever visited a website and encountered an error it may have mentioned this word, as in “server error” or “server is overcapacity.” At work or in the office you may have heard of a shared files server, or an email server. But what is a server, and what does it do?

If you close your eyes and imagine a server you’re probably thinking of a room filled with stacks of computer equipment. It is loud, and tall as computers are arranged in racks. This is indeed what many companies use in their server rooms.

Let’s get technical about the meaning of the word server, as this term is used widely in the area of information technology. A server is both a computer program that is capable of receiving and handling requests from other computers and programs, and it is also the computer hardware that is running that software.

There are many servers that we may or may not be familiar with: file servers, email servers, web servers, database servers, print servers, etc. You can even turn your old computer into a server for your home! Why would you want to do this? Let’s look at an example.

You got a new laptop. You also have a printer. You want to be able to use this printer wirelessly from all of the computers on your network, but this printer doesn’t have an Ethernet port or wireless capabilities. You may think you’re SOL but you’re not. If you connect a computer to this printer and share the printer on your network, you’ve created a print server! Now any computer on your home network can connect to the computer hooked up to the printer and send it things to print. This computer accepts the requests from the others and send the documents to the printer.

What else could you do? Well for starters you could share some (or all) of the folders on this computer so that you’ll be able to access that data from anywhere in your home. Now you’ve got a file server! If you install a small program to share media over a protocol called DLNA compliant Upnp you’ve got a media server that’ll allow you to access photos, music and videos from your home theater devices, like smart TVs, blu-ray players, Xboxes and PlayStations!

Most of the servers at work are just beefed up versions of this example. They use dedicated and specialized hardware instead of old computers, and they have special pieces of software that do things like host databases, or provide email. It’s usually best to have dedicated servers for each application, but sometimes that isn’t feasibly. The workaround is creating virtual machines – emulations of individual computers inside of the physical computers. One physical server can host many VMs. This separates the servers and allows you to track down problems.