From the course: Linux System Engineer: Web Servers and DNS Using Apache, NGINX, and BIND

How web servers work - Red Hat Enterprise Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux System Engineer: Web Servers and DNS Using Apache, NGINX, and BIND

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How web servers work

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- I won't spend too much time talking about how web servers work as I assume you already have this knowledge. I will skim over a few items briefly though. HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, is a protocol for the web which provides the standards for display and hyperlink content in the internet. A web server provides non-sequential access to content usually in HTML format to clients usually via the HTTP protocol. A secure version of HTTP is HTTPS, which uses SSL and TLS to encrypt the tunnel. There are many different types of web servers but Apache has nearly 50 percent market share of all active websites. The popularity of the web and open source itself tracks the popularity of Apache directly. Early on, Apache was the killer application for open source in the web as it could host more than one website per server, via its virtual hostability. Another popular open source web server is Nginx, which has been gaining on Apache over the years due to its speed. Roughly 20 percent of active websites run on Nginx, so it's worth the trouble learning. Google has its own custom web server as well, which provides roughly eight percent of active websites. Other web servers would include Microsoft's IIS, which leads the market in parked domain names. This means people have reserved the domain, but aren't using it. Microsoft owns a number of web hosting, cloud hosting, and domain registration companies, which contributes to this number. About seven percent of active websites run a Microsoft IIS, although at one time, it was as high as 38 percent. Web clients in order of popularity would be Google Chrome, Apple Safari, UC Browser, which is used in China, Microsoft Firefox, followed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers.

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