#TechForNewbies: Client vs. Server
Client and Server are terms you will hear ALL the time in your technical career — but what do they actually mean?
Imagine the internet is a restaurant, and that will give you a clue.
Think of the server as the waiter, and the customer as the client. The client places an order and receives it — but the server is on-call constantly, handling and serving multiple orders, queuing them, and interacting with multiple clients constantly.
The same goes in computing — here’s a comparison:
Server
- Provides a service — generating responses for the client
- Multi-user
- Always on
- Static IP Address (more on those later!)
Client
- Receives a service — making requests of the server
- Single user (e.g. you, or your device)
- Occasional usage(request-response)
- Dynamic IP Addresses
In the digital world, a really easy example to understand is email. If you think about your email Client — you load it up to view your inbox and send emails as and when you like— but your client is constantly interacting with the server, which is managing the inboxes of thousands of other users, and is constantly ‘switched on’ ready to send and process emails.
You will also hear the terms Client-side and Server-side — this simply refers to the technology and operations at the end of the client (on their device), or of the server, accordingly!
For further reading, have a look at this great article on Client vs. Server Terminology.
