Why Do You Need A Web Server?

This is a basic overview of why you might need a web server. All websites use web servers. The name comes from the fact that the the server actually servers web pages just like this one! So lets take this page as an example of a page served by a web server.

In order to reach this page you searched for the term "why do you need a web server" in Google or Yahoo or MSN. When you clicked the google page result with the name of this page a request went to a server in this websites datacenter. The web server (in this case Apache) is listening for these requests - yours included. When it receives a request it looks to see if the page that you requested is available and of course it is as you are looking at it :-). So it sends the page back to your browser.

So from this websites perspective we need a web server in order to be able to respond to requests for web pages. The web server is the point of entry to the website and any backend systems that it might interface with. A database is a good example of a backend system. This site uses Worpress which in turn uses a MYSQL database. So when our web server received your page request it first retrieved the page information from the database and then displayed it to you.

In a nutshell the web server is the software that "serves" the website pages to your browser.