The term "web server farm" refers to a group of servers that work together to deliver web content. In terms of pronunciation, "web" is pronounced as /wɛb/ with a short "e" sound, and "server" is pronounced as /ˈsɜrvər/ with the stress on the first syllable. "Farm" is pronounced as /fɑrm/ with an "a" sound like in "car" and a silent "e" at the end. Together, the word is pronounced as /wɛb ˈsɜrvər ˌfɑrm/.
A web server farm refers to a cluster or group of multiple web servers that work collectively to provide high-performance and scalable web hosting services. It is designed to handle and distribute the incoming internet traffic efficiently by distributing the workload across multiple servers rather than relying on a single server.
The primary purpose of a web server farm is to enhance the website's performance, offer high availability, reduce downtime, and provide better reliability. By using load balancing techniques, the incoming requests are distributed evenly amongst the web servers, ensuring that no single server becomes overloaded. This load balancing mechanism enables the web servers to handle a larger number of simultaneous requests, leading to improved performance and faster response times for website visitors.
Web server farms are commonly used by large-scale websites, e-commerce platforms, or online services that witness heavy traffic and need to handle numerous concurrent requests. By employing redundancy and fault-tolerant methods, such as backup power supplies and data replication, they ensure that the website remains accessible even if one or more web servers fail or experience technical issues.
Overall, a web server farm is an infrastructure solution that allows websites to scale and handle high volumes of traffic efficiently by distributing the load across multiple servers, leading to improved performance, reliability, and availability.