thought about this while making my minecraft server, what is a server?
In: Technology
It’s a computer that does things for other computers.
So it serves them, it’s a server.
It’s something that’s always on some kind of network, usually something thing connected to the internet.
What the thing it does depends on what kind of server it is.
For most game servers, the server tracks where everything in the game world is and figures out how it all interacts.
The client (EG your computer) tells the server what you want your character to do and the server tells you what happened in the game world.
But it could be something like giving you a stream of video information, or doing your bank stuff.
Now a days, it’s much more common for the computer to not be a real computer, but rather a virtual machine running on another computer (a lot of it is done by Amazon).
It sounds silly but a server is simply a computer running a service or services usually on a network. In most cases, it refers to a computer pretty much dedicated to simply running these services. Services include hosting a game, running the html pages for a website, running the email, providing security and authentication, storing and organizing centralized and shared files, running a big financial package or database and many more.
The complement (normally) to a server is a client. A client is a computer that is usually operated by a human (although not necessarily so in modern times). Think of a client as an end user of services.
A Server is basically just a computer, that is open for other computers to connect to it via a network. This is mostly done to “outsource” computing power or to enable collaborative work. In your case this would be “working” together on a Minecraft world.
A server is a special computer used to host other connections. Sometimes it can be run from a regular computer too.
You can open your own Minecraft server for others to play on, or you can pay Microsoft to rent o e (Realms). The rented one is located somewhere outside your home, where as one you run yourself is from a computer you own.
* A server is a ***software application*** that gives out information when asked for it.
* For example a web server is an application that will send HTML data that makes up a webpage to a browser that asks for it.
* The reason most other folks have being saying that a server is a computer, is because *most of the time the* server applications run on special dedicated computers that are designed just to make sure that one application works well.
* These computers have themselves become known as “servers” but that’s really just short hand for “server computer”.
* But you can run a server on almost any computer, or even your smart phone.
* You can also run multiple servers on the same computer.
* For example most home routers has a web server built in that allows you to change the settings of the router, while they also have a DNS server that allows your home computers to convert a website address like “[Google.com](https://Google.com)” into the IP address of Google’s computers (the ones that host their web server application for [google.com](https://google.com))
* So while most people think a server is a physical machine, it’s really the software running on the machine.
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