The Internet is the whole of both virtual and physical networks that can be divided into two areas with software and hardware, on the basis of which data flow is provided within the framework of protocols between the server and the client. A lot can be said about the Internet, various definitions can be made, but in this article, we will try to talk about one of the important players that brought it to us, not the Internet. From network servers... You can find the information you will find here in a deeper way in various channels of the internet, but differently, here we will discuss the subject in a simpler and more understandable way in order to answer some question marks in the minds of people who are new to this business.

At the beginning of the article, we mentioned that the internet is between the server and the client. So what are server and client, let's start here first. The client can be defined as each person who has a device with internet access and who has a presence in internet networks with this device. Clients perform a number of operations on the Internet, such as entering a website, opening, viewing, using, downloading and uploading the files in that website. Each of these processes takes action on internet networks as a request. However, if there is a response that responds to a sent request, the action is taken. This structure, which we can call the backbone of the internet that responds to client requests, is also called a server. Servers are computer units that host various files that can be accessed by clients and that are open to use and sharing, or that provide various services such as file transfer, e-mail, and website. Servers, which are basically equipped computers, are divided into six types according to their basic functions. Network servers are only one of these six types of servers.

What are Network Servers?

Network servers, or web server with its universal name, can be briefly defined as the server responsible for publishing a website on internet networks. By responding to requests made by clients to web sites, it shows the web site files on the server to clients through a set of rules. This set of rules is called the HTTP (hyper text transfer protocol) protocol. The HTTP protocol can be called the path followed when the web site files hosted in the server are displayed by the network server to the client who wants to enter that site.

Network servers are programs that are installed in the operating system inside servers that are physically composed of various computer components. So network servers are also a kind of software. In general, servers are machines with the hardware that a computer has, but instead of being managed from a screen, they are managed remotely with a command system system. Network servers, on the other hand, work as a program with the support of the server machine's hardware, as they are software developed in various ways. There are many large and small network servers in the world. In the continuation of our article, we will discuss the most used network servers in the world. The aim here is not to make a comparison, but to have an idea by examining these systems used by the majority in detail.

The most used web servers in the world can be listed as Apache, Nginx and Internet Information Service (i.e. IIS).

Apache WebServer

Apache Web Server is an open source web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Its powerful and stable operation, as well as the fact that it is available for free due to its open source code, has placed Apache in an important position in the internet world. 60% of the websites in the world are served by Apache Web Server. When the audience using Apache is so large, the support communities can be very large, so hosting employees can easily find solutions to the problems they encounter with Apache. On the other hand, the fact that Apache is free opens the door to income from the technical support provided. ASF and its partnership companies can generate income by providing technical support to institutions using Apache.

Apache is of great importance for the internet network to reach this point today. Being developed by a community with the aim of a reliable, strong and flexible structure has made Apache a constantly evolving and growing structure. Apache, which can run on Microsoft and Linux operating systems, is known to work most efficiently on Linux operating systems. Although it can run on Microsoft operating system, it cannot support ASP.NET applications, which is another Microsoft product. On the other hand, it runs PHP and Java applications without any problems.

Multi-user websites using Apache need a load balancer on their servers. Because Apache, which does not have the ability to separate and distribute the traffic coming to the site, can cause crashes on the site in case of excessive density. For this reason, a load balancer should be used to share the traffic among the servers on the websites with high traffic. Nginx, another most used web server, handles this problem without the need for an extra load balancer.

Nginx WebServer

Nginx was written by Russian software engineer Igor Sysoev in the early 2000s as a fast and stable mail client. However, it has been developed and not only as a mail client, but also as a powerful, high-performance and lightweight web server. This web server, which is open source like Apache, basically uses its hardware more efficiently because it does not create a new process for every request. In other words, it exhibits a light behavior with using less RAM capacity.

The community, which can be reached when needed, has become a large audience about Nginx, whose popularity is increasing day by day. Its multi-functionality has made Nginx one of the indispensables of the internet world in a short time. It can provide not only web server, but also HTTP load balancer, reverse proxy server and e-mail proxy server.

Nginx's working logic is slightly different from that of traditional web servers. It is useful to talk about this difference here without going too deep. To enter a site, when you type the domain name of the site in the domain of your browser, the browser sends a request to that site. Traditional network servers create a transaction and respond to each incoming request, but as we mentioned above, Nginx works with a different architecture, instead of turning each request into a transaction, it responds to requests collectively. In this way, it can handle thousands of simultaneous requests of the same type comfortably and using less RAM than traditional network servers. This structure of Nginx enables it to work very successfully on static sites, search engines and e-commerce sites. On the other hand, the fact that it does not need an external load balancer makes Nginx indispensable for high traffic sites.

Although Microsoft works on many Linux and Unix-based operating systems, Nginx's performance on Microsoft is worse than other operating systems.

Internet Information Service (IIS)

Internet Information Service (IIS) is another most preferred network server in the world, developed by Microsoft, which is closed source unlike the other two network servers. Although it is closed source code, its license is paid and it is seen that it is not very prone to personalized use. In addition, it is easy to install and use and provides extensive support for Microsoft IIS.

Although IIS seems to be less preferred if it only works in the Microsoft operating system, it is a web server that can run applications such as ASP.NET and PHP applications under the .NET roof, which makes IIS valuable.