The World Wide Web is an integral part of the Internet. In fact, in many peoples’ eyes, the Web is the Internet. Although this view is incorrect (it ignores email, FTP, and many other protocols), it does reflect the importance and visibility of the Web to average users.
Just what is the Web, though, and how is it implemented? At its core, the Web is a series of server computers that run server programs implementing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and its secure variant, HTTPS. According to an ongoing Netcraft survey available at http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html, the most popular Web server software by far is Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/). In January, 2006 (the latest figures available as the magazine goes to press), Apache manages almost 70% of the Web sites surveyed. The next most popular server package, Microsoft’s IIS, manages just under 21% of the Web’s sites. Apache is available for Linux — in fact, all major Linux distributions ship with Apache — so if you want to run a Web site on the market- leading package, you can do so.
Despite its hugely dominant position, though, Apache isn’t the only choice in web servers, nor is it necessarily the best choice. Apache is a large program with lots of features, which makes it very flexible. These characteristics also mean that Apache consumes a lot of resources and, at least in theory, make it more susceptible to bugs than smaller packages. (In practice, of…
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