Web Server Hardware

Companies use a wide variety of computer brands, types, and sizes to host electronic commerce operations. Some small companies can run Web sites on desktop PCs. Most electronic commerce Web sites are operated on computers designed for that purpose, however.
Server Computers

Web server computers generally have more memory, larger (and faster) hard disk drives, and faster processors than the typical desktop or notebook PCs with which you are probably familiar. Many Web server computers use multiple processors; very few desktop PCs have more than one processor. Because Web server computers use more capable hardware elements and more of these elements, they are usually much more expensive than workstation PCs. Today, a high end desktop PC with 512 MB of RAM, a 2.5 GHz processor, a 10OGB IDE disk drive, a good monitor, and a complement of DVD/CD RW drives costs between $2000 and $4000. A company might be able to buy a low end Web server computer for about the same amount of money, but most companies spend between $6000 and $400,000 on a Web server. Companies that sell Web server hardware, such as Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, and Sun, all have configuration tools on their Web sites that allow visitors to design their own Web servers.

Although some Web server computers are housed in free standing cases, most are, installed in equipment racks. These racks are usually about 6 feet tall and 19 inches wide. They can each hold several mid range server computers. A recent innovation in server computer design is to put small server computers on a single computer board and then install many of those boards into a rack mounted frame. These servers on a card are called blade servers, and some manufacturers now make them so small that more than 300 of them can be installed in a single 6 foot rack.

Recall that the fundamental job of a Web server is to process and respond to Web client requests that are sent using HTTP. For a client request for a Web page, the server program finds and retrieves the page, creates an HTTP header, and appends the HTML document to it. For dynamic pages, the server uses an architecture with three or more tiers that invokes other programs, receives the results from the backend process, formats the response, and sends the pages and other objects to the requesting client program. IP sharing, or a virtual server, is a feature that allows different groups to share a single Web server's Internet Protocol (IP) address. A virtual server or virtual host is a feature that maintains more than one server on one machine. This means that groups can have seperate domain names, but all domain name refer to the same physical web server.

Domain Name Search