You often hear this word but not everyone knows what it really means. Basically a server is a computer, which is turned on all the time. Obviously it is much more powerfull than a normal computer and has bigger storage available.

Servers are essential for a network either for small groups such as organisations or for large public groups such as the internet. Data is stored on servers, such as websites, for example when you do a google search your demande will be sent to the corresponding server of google, it will retrieve the information and then send it back to you. Big websites such as google, amazon, microsoft etc have many servers, in order to respond quickly, other wise they would be overflooded with millions of requests and your end the website will be really slow.

Hackers also use servers to send out spam. When they find a server without an antivirus software of in which they can hack into, they use it to send thousands of emails per second. All servers are monitored by a company, when the company detects that a server is sending out too much data per second, it isolates it and cuts of it’s acces to the internet. It also informs everyone that that server must be ignored and it has become a spam server.

All the servers are connected to each other, this is how internet works. They can be used for different reasons, such as to store data, this why companys have servers, so they have one centrale database where all the employees can store their work. The risk is that if the server crashes all the information could be lost, therefore server backups must be done regularly. Most often a backup is done at the end of every day, that way if data is lost, it is only a days work.