I hear the word server in all sorts of contexts whenever computers are involved. What is a server and how does it relate to a PC?
In: Technology
A PC is something you can type on and use directly, yourself. When your PC is on the internet, it “talks” to other computers to get information (the weather, videos, music, and so on). Those other computers are the servers. Your PC requests information over the internet to the servers. The servers send back the results and your PC displays it on the screen. The cool thing is, the servers can be just about anywhere… the same place as you, or in another country.
Really big internet companies like Google and Netflix have whole huge buildings with rooms filled with servers. These are called data centers or server farms. They’re needed because millions of people use the internet, and the demand for current information is huge.
A lot of answers focus on network services, but client-server setups are used in a lot of different ways on a computer. For example, a computer might have a sound system server that other programs can connect to and use to queue up sounds to be played.
I think in generic terms, a server is a computer system that does actions on behalf of other systems (clients). Client systems connect to it and tell it what to do. Servers can provide websites, database access, system services, etc.
A server is just a computer that is dedicated to providing some service or content to clients (individual users’ computers/phones/etc.) The internet largely works on a client-server model where you, the client, connect to some server to get the data you need (the other model is peer-to-peer, and that’s where there is no central server hosting the data, it’s shared across many clients that connect to each other, like bittorrent.) Any kind of computer that has networking capabilities can be a server, but most servers tend to be specialized computers that are very good at handling lots of traffic or processing a lot of data.
It’s a computer that is connected to the internet and that other computers talk to. For instance when you visit reddit on your laptop or your mobile phone, your device sends a request over the internet to one of reddit’s servers and the server replies with the data corresponding to what you wanted to look at.
Trying for an ELI5 answer.
On the internet, your home PC is private. You don’t share it with other people. On the internet, there are computers that are in public space, where everybody comes together to share information. For example, eBay is a public place to come together and trade.
A server is the computer that hosts the public web pages. It’s called a server because of its role in SERVING information to everyone.
Likewise, many companies have private servers for just their companies, where the employees share information. So it’s a public area that is private to the company. it’s not open to the general public.
Web pages are hosted on servers. Cloud disk drives are hosted on servers. Shipping websites are hosted on servers.
You can imagine that servers need to operate at scale to answer thousands of requests per second. So these computers can be really big. And you may need many of them working together. So Server computer hardware is different than home PC, they are usually built into a big refrigerator sized cabinet. This hardware would also be called “a server.”
EDIT. in principle, the computer is of the same kind of computers as a PC. Such as they both use AMD or Intel processors. It’s the same hardware ecosystem. But server hardware is bigger and made for endurance. So from a programming perspective it’s the same, but it looks different.
A server serves information.
It is not necessarily its own computer. I have run servers on my home computer and on my laptop. I could install software called Apache which is a web server. Whenever I do that I also install MyQSL which is a database server. I have also added file servers and control servers to my regular PC. So at the most basic, the server is software.
You can get a light bulb with a web server on it. Your internet modem has a server on it if you are able to access a web page for configuration that’s built into it.
At work I use a whole bunch of different kinds of servers. Some of the specialized ones are just web servers installed on little pieces of equipment. It could be a door controller, air conditioner controller, phone system, or many other things.
When I walk into the server room there are some big metal boxes in there that we call servers. These are really powerful reliable machines with multiple processors, lots of hard drives, lots of RAM, multiple network ports, and more than one power supply. But these machines run a program that allows them to have virtual servers inside of them. While it only one physical machine, it looks like I could have 10 or 20 machines running Linux or Windows Server (the actual name of the operating system). These are all just like fully fledged computers running inside the software of the big physical server.
So I look at the big metal server computer, and inside of it I have 10 virtual computers that I call servers. When I run any of those servers they could be running software that’s acting as a server to provide coordinated information to computers that are the clients.
Summary
A server is a machine. It can run virtual machines on it that are called servers. These can then run multiple services that act as servers to all the clients.
All the other answers are right, but I wanted to add that a server is more accurately described as a piece of software that provides resources to some other piece of software. It doesn’t have to be a special computer, and it doesn’t even have to provide those resources to a separate computer. You can run a webserver locally and access it from the same computer.
As far as computing goes, any computer, from your laptop to a giant mainframe can be a server if it serves data to another computer called a client.
If you start hosting minecraft for a few of your friends on your PC, you are a server. If your friend is hosting minecraft and you are connecting to them, your friend’s PC is the server and your PC is the client.
Server doesn’t have to imply big huge machines, but it is often the case in enterprise level computing where the computer is serving hundreds of thousands of different clients at once. So to do that they need to be huge to have lots of CPU, memory and other needed infrastructure.
Nowadays, it’s a perspective more than anything else. In a system involving more than one computer, the server is the machine where the files come from amd the main software runs, while the client is where the user sits amd controls what the server does. A server might have many clients at once (as is common in Websites), and the same machine might be both a client and the server (this was once common in multiplayer games like Doom and Quake, but it is less common nowadays).
Any computer that has access to a network can be a server, including PCs. It’s possible to buy computers that are geared more toward server work. These tend to focus more on storage, networking, and number of CPU cores, amd their cases are meant to be stored with other hardware in equipment racks. PCs, on the other hand, tend these days to focus more on GPU prowess, peripheral connectivity, and the cases are stored on or under a desk. But either type of machine can be a server when needed.
A server is just a computer that other computers talk to for stuff. “Stuff” in this case can quite literally be anything. Take for example, Reddit (note that this is purely for illustration purposes. I do not know how Reddit is actually laid out).
You (the “Client”) want to access Reddit. When you type in “Reddit.com” in your browser, you will see the web page displayed by Reddit’s “Web Server”. While lurking and just passively looking at discussions can be fun, you eventually want to have active participation, so you create an account and log in. Your credentials will be handled by Reddit’s “Authentication Server” to validate if you supplied the correct credentials and thus granted the rights to browse and comment and the like.
Another example: Gaming. On your end is the game installed on your computer or mobile (the game “Client”). You wanna play let’s say WoW. You log in (which repeats the steps described previously). This time however, your Game Client is responsible for delivering information to your screen and processing what you see. All the while communicating with the Game Server. The Game Server handles all Game Logic, which tracks the damage you take and deal, on which targets, and any other game-related functions such as inventories and the like, and stores those pieces of information within the server. This is why you can play your account on any computer the game is installed in as long as you know your credentials, and you cannot simply go back to a back up save like in a normal, single player game.
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