A server is just a computer that answers when other computers ask. But that simple relationship—one serving many—is the architecture underneath everything online.
Your phone is mostly a window—what you see through it lives on servers miles away. Client-server architecture is the pattern that makes this split work, and it powers nearly everything you do online.
A server is the computer. A service is the software running on it. One sentence, but the implications reshape how you think about every outage, every scaling decision, every architecture choice.
Servers assume everything fails—power supplies, drives, memory, fans. The hardware is designed so that when failure comes, nothing stops.
The choice between Linux, Windows Server, and others isn't about features—it's about which tradeoffs fit your reality. Here's what actually matters.
Physical servers sit idle most of the time. Virtualization fixes this absurd waste by letting multiple servers share the same hardware—each believing it has the machine to itself.
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