Web Server

A web server is the part of your technology stack that answers requests. When a web browser asks for a page, the web server receives that request and sends back a response, typically the HTML, images, and files that the browser then assembles into the web page you experience.

The term does double duty. It can mean the physical or virtual machine, or the software running on it that handles the request/response cycle. Either way, it is central to hosting. If the web server is down or overwhelmed, visitors get errors, which is why much of planning for hosting comes down to keeping the server reliably answering.