Before talking about web server let's know what is web. The web or World Wide Web and in short www. It was invented by Tim Berners Lee in 1989. It is a collection of websites or web servers connected to a local computer through the internet. These websites contain text pages, Images, audio, videos, etc. We can access these sites from any part of the world over the internet using our devices such as cellphones and laptops etc. Now come to the web server. In simple words we can say, a web server is a computer that runs websites. it is software that responds to the request for web resources. A web server consists of hardware and software that use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to respond to web users' requests made over the world wide web. In other words, A web server communicates with a web browser using HTTP. The work of a web server is to display website content through storing, processing, and delivering webpages to users.

How does a web server work?

Now we will know how it works. A web browser uses HTTP to request a file hosted on a web server. The HTTP server accepts this request, finds the file, and then sends it back to the browser using HTTP and then web users see the website content. If the server doesn't find the requested document, it returns a 404 error response instead. There are many web servers like Apache, Nginx, Litespeed, etc. Now I think it gives a clear explanation of a web server. For now, I am just going to talk about two-

Apache HTTP server -: Apache is the most famous web server in the world developed by the Apache Software foundation. This web server is open source and free. It can be installed on almost operating systems including Linux, UNIX, Windows, Mac OS X, and more. Most web server machines run the Apache web server.

Nginx -: Nginx is also a popular web server worldwide. This is free and open source. Nginx is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.