What is a server?
In: Engineering
Assuming you’re referring to computers:
In general, a computer is a computer. They can do lots of things. It all depends on what software you program into them.
One of those things computers can do is talk to other computers. The way this usually works is one computer will wrap up a message to the other computer and ask for a resource from it. It might ask, “May I have the file at `www.reddit.com`?”, for example. The other computer presumably has software that is sitting around, listening for these kinds of requests. When it gets one, it will determine what that first computer wants, whether it is allowed to see it, and if so, *serves* that request to it. The second computer is a *server* in this case.
A server is any computer running software that sits around and listens for requests like this. Or, depending on who you ask, the instance of software that’s doing the listening is the server. A “virtual” server.
Often, a computer acting as a server needs to handle a *lot* of requests. More requests than any old computer running server software can normally handle. So, special computers are made that are designed *specifically* to be servers. They’re optimized to run server software exclusively. These computers themselves are also often just called “servers”. When you hear of a “server farm”, or a “server room”, chances are it’s a room full of these special computers sitting on a rack in a big cooled room.
But the thing to remember is that, at the end of the day, a computer is a computer. Usually. These servers can just as well behave like a personal computer and run any software a computer like yours (assuming you have one) can run, though it would be insanely overkill to use it that way. On the flipside, your computer could probably run whatever software that server is running, but probably not as efficiently. It’s all a matter of how they’re used.
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