this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Yes and...no?
A serveroften refers a piece of (virtual) hardware, that has some software running that serves content or services to you, usually over the network/internet. It also often means that it's running and accessible 24/7.It can also refer to a piece of software that serves those services/content that you can install anywhere. A game server e.g. might be provided by the game publisher for online play, but you could also be able to connect to a private server that's ran by you or your friend (e.g. Minecraft allows that) or that only runs on your PC for local network play. Webserver fall into this meaning - they are just a piece of software that speak the protocols use on the internet and serve you webpages. In theory you can run them anywhere.
I feel like Jan from The IT Crowd. I'm reading this paragraph again and it still is like TV snow to me :(
I thought servers were the physical machines where the cloud is stored. Like everything has to live somewhere and the servers are the hardware where stuff lives.
"Server" is a colloquialism. As used in casual speech, it's a system that serves something. If you can access anything the system offers remotely, it's serving to you and therefore is a server.
Long before I really got into IT, my mom's laptop had an internet connection it shared. That was a server.
After that but before I setup my first Linux system, my brother and I were sharing files from our desktops. We were both servers (and clients).
A server is just something that serves something.
To add to Toynbee's answer, any computer can become a server if you run some kind of program on it that provides that function. That program runs in the background continuously and waits for other computers, named "clients", to send requests to the "server" computer.
Yes, that includes your own PC, even while you're in the middle of using it. If you were running a website on your PC, i.e. a persistent background application that serves a website, you could type
http://localhost/into your browser and connect to that website. That makes your PC perform the duties of both client and server at the same time. Fun stuff.It's called "localhost" because, while a "server" is mostly referring to the software on the machine, the "host" refers to the software and hardware together. It's "local" as opposed to "remote" because all computers that aren't the one you're on right now are remote, distant, away.
That's a very enlightening reply. :))