A Web server is a program that, using the client/server model and the World Wide Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ), serves the files that form Web pages to Web users (whose computers contain HTTP clients that forward their requests). Every computer on the Internet that contains a Web site must have a Web server program. Two leading Web servers are Apache , the most widely-installed Web server, and Microsoft's Internet Information Server ( IIS ). Other Web servers include Novell's Web Server for users of its NetWare operating system and IBM's family of Lotus Domino servers, primarily for IBM's OS/390 and AS/400 customers.

Web servers are able to handle hundreds of thousands of requests a second and can return back this information quickly, providing the visitor of a website with the information they were looking for in no time at all.

It is big business to keep servers online – this is called uptime and it is the measurement of how long as server is online and functional for during the period of a month, or year. A lot of hosting companies boast their servers have 99.9% uptime, which means 99.9% of the time (per month) their servers are online and functional, meaning all websites hosted on their servers will be working.

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