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Design Your Own Web Page Article
Your Web Design has no meaning without knowing a bit about the web server
on which your web site is ultimately going to be hosted!
Many types of web servers exists. So from the web design stage itself you have
to decide on what type of web server is going to host your web site. So before
you begin your web design, decide on what web server is going to host your site.
The Basics of Web Servers.
Web servers are high power computers connected to the internet that host
websites. It serves pages upon request to visitors. Commercially, this service
is known as web hosting.
Web server is the place where you host your finely planned web site on which you have spend lot of time on web design. It can be imagined as a room in which you place your web site and run it with the help of the web design strategy that you used.
There are a lot of web servers out there. Whenever you go to a website,
you're downloading it from a web server. When you pay money to a web host, what
you're really doing is renting a space on their web server. The Internet
consists of millions of computers networked together, but it's the servers that
are providing all the information that makes up the web – you can't have a
website unless it's on a server. There fore, web servers forms a vital part in
your web design strategy.
A powerful web server can retrieve web pages fast. Slower and less powerful web
servers can result in frustrating the viewers due to slower download time. So
these factors must be considered from the initial stages of web design itself.
High traffic can also slow servers that are not powerful enough to handle
high volumes of data exchange. This factor too should be considered in your web
design pattern.
So the moral of the story is, you cannot plan or strategize a web design without
taking into consideration which web server you are going for. This has to be
very clear from the beginning itself.
What is a Web Server?
A web server is really just a powerful computer – they use the same kinds of
processors and memory that normal computers use, but they have more of it.
Servers usually run a Unix or Unix-like operating system like Linux or BSD, but
they can just as easily run Windows.
What makes these computers servers isn't their hardware – it's the software they
run. Web server software includes the HTTP server itself, as well as databases
and other things that are needed to make a web server work however it needs to.
This is why different hosts offer different features: they have different
programs installed on their servers.
Web Servers Serve Files.
The role of the web server, at its most basic level, is to send people your
files over HTTP. It has a hard disk (often more than one) and stores your files
like any other computer – if you don't upload a file called 'index.html', many
servers will list all your files for you instead of providing a web page. It's
the replacement of the index.html (named because it is supposed to be an index
of files) that creates the illusion of everything on the server being one 'web
site', instead of a set of files linked together.
Web Servers Run Scripts.
The capacity of the web server to run different types of script must be
ascertained before you start your web design.
Of course, web servers don't always just serve the same files over and over
again. Sometimes they need to insert other information into pages, especially
information that comes from databases. This is done with scripting languages
like PHP and Perl – the server is told that it should give files that end in .pl
or .php to the appropriate script interpreters, and these interpreters then tell
the server what to send to the browser. This means that dynamic websites can
often be slow, as the server is having to produce a different page for each
visitor.
Virtual Servers and Dedicated Servers.
When you buy web hosting, though, you're not necessarily getting a whole server
to yourself – in fact, the chances are that you're not, unless you're paying
lots of money. Instead, you'll be sharing a server with the hosts' other
customers. You might not realize this, since the server doesn't appear to have
anything on it that isn't yours, but the other customers are simply being hidden
from you – you're using what is known as a 'virtual server'.
For small websites, there isn't really any option other than virtual servers:
they're a great idea for letting resources be shared among lots of websites that
don't use much of the server's power or space. If one of the sites does start
growing, though, you might find your website slowing down. Oddly enough, this
fact means that it's often better to find a host that offers price plans with
limits instead of one that offers 'unlimited' disk space and bandwidth to each
customer – your website will be much faster at the 'limited' host.
More Than You'd Think.
One thing that people don't often think about is that there's more than one web
server program out there. It's not really visible to visitors, since they all do
basically the same thing, but there are lots of servers available, and they're
all quite different in the way they work. There are three main groups:
Apache. The open source Apache software is the most popular server
software out there, with around 70% of the market share.
Microsoft servers. Microsoft are responsible for the various versions of
IIS (Internet Information Server) and PWS (Personal Web Server), which
altogether have around 20% of the market.
Sun servers. Sun produce lots of servers, most notably the
Netscape-branded ones. The market share of these servers depends on whether you
count all sites (making it 3%) or just the actively maintained ones (in which
case it drops to less than 1%).
The topic of Web Server and Web Design can extend to a full book! But we
genuinely hope that you have understood the basics of it in this artcile.
Source for statistics: netcraft.com.
Other servers available are mostly 'simple' servers that don't have all the
somewhat unnecessary features of these servers, such as thttpd (the 't' is for
tiny or turbo). There are literally hundreds of them, but they have mostly
negligible market share.
Without an ending, this article on web design will not be considered complete.
So we now end this article on a happy note.
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