FTP client

What you need to use Internet Explorer as an FTP client

If you want to connect to your web hosting server using FTP with Internet Explorer, you need the following information:

   1. The username (sometimes also called user ID) of your FTP account
   2. The password of your FTP account
   3. The hostname or address of your FTP account (also known as the server address)

You can find the above information in the email you have received from your web hosting company.
FTP with Internet Explorer

Open a new Internet Explorer window. And type in the following in the Address field and hit the Enter key.

ftp://YOUR-FTP-OR-SERVER-ADDRESS

Note: Instead of http:// we are using ftp://. Substitute YOUR-FTP-OR-SERVER-ADDRESS with the actual address of your web hosting server.

A dialog box pops up (refer image below) asking you the login details (username and password) of your server. Enter these and you would be connected to your web site hosting account.
Before the dialog box is displayed, you might get an error saying that you don't have permission to access this server, in which case, you need to follow the steps below.

Since our browser does not display the login box, we need a way around it. What we will do now is to append the login details to the FTP address and try to login once again. You need to type the following in the browser Address field.

ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@YOUR-FTP-OR-SERVER-ADDRESS

Remember to put a colon (:) between your username and password and add an "at" sign (@) followed by the server address. Since the username and password would be visible to prying eyes, this method is less secure but works. Any way, the username and password are not displayed once you connect successfully to your web hosting account.

Lastly, click on the "Folders" button on the top to get a display of the folders on your computer and on the web server. Internet Explorer is now ready to act as an FTP client!

You can now copy or move files from your computer to the web host, delete files, rename files, change permissions etc. on the web server just as you would on your local computer. Ain't that cool?

Getting the Internet Explorer web browser to act like an FTP client it a neat thing. However, it has certain drawbacks. Since there is no log file maintained you can lose track of which files had been uploaded and which were in queue if you get disconnected for some reason. Internet Explorer is definitely slower than an FTP client when transferring files. The browser might also crash if you have put a lot of files for uploading or downloading (but this hasn't happened to me when I was testing).

The final verdict is you can use Internet Explorer as FTP software if you need to transfer a few small-sized files. However, if you maintain web sites for a living, I would recommend a dedicated FTP client and you can refer to the list of FTP clients for more information.

Web Servers List

 

Web Servers List
Here is a detailed and updated list of the most important and popular web servers:
Apache web server - the HTTP web server

Free and the most popular web server in the world developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache web server is an open source software and can be installed and made to work on almost all operating systems including Linux, Unix, Windows, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and more. About 60% of the web server machines run the Apache web server - Refer Web server usage statistics from Netcraft.
Apache Web Server
Apache Tomcat

The Apache Tomcat has been developed to support servlets and JSP scripts. Though it can serve as a standalone server, Tomcat is generally used along with the popular Apache HTTP web server or any other web server. Apache Tomcat is free and open source and can run on different operating systems like Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, Free BSD.
Apache Tomcat
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Internet Information Services (IIS)

The IIS for Windows Server 2003 operating system has been developed by the software giant, Microsoft. It offers higher levels of performance and security than its predecessor, the Windows 2000 server. It also comes with a good support from the company and is the second most popular server on the web.
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
lighttpd

lighttpd, pronounced "lighty" (don't ask me why), is a free web server that is distributed with the FreeBSD operating system. This open source web server is fast, secure and consumes much less CPU power. Lighttpd can also run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris operating systems.
lighttpd web server
Jigsaw

Jigsaw (W3C's Server) comes from the World Wide Web Consortium. It is open source and free and can run on various platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X Free BSD etc. Jigsaw has been written in Java and can run CGI scripts and PHP programs.
The Jigsaw web server software from W3C
Sun Java System Web Server

This web server from Sun Microsystems is suited for medium and large web sites. Though the server is free it is not open source. It however, runs on Windows, Linux and Unix platforms (at the time of writing the Mac OS X and FreeBSD operating systems were not supported). The Sun Java System web server supports various server-side languages and technologies such as JSP, Java Servlets, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP and Coldfusion.
Sun Web Server
Xitami web server

Xitami is a free, open source web server developed by iMatrix Corporation. FYI, Xitami is iMatrix spelled backwards. The development has stopped after version 2.5, however, it remains popular on small networks. The server is not the fastest in the market but has a small footprint and is available for Windows, Linux and Unix platforms.
Xitami web server
Zeus web server

The Zeus web server runs on Linux and Free BSD operating systems. It has been developed by Zeus technology Ltd. And is known for its speed, reliability, security and flexibility. The web server is used on some of the busiest web sites of the world including Ebay. Zeus web server is not free and costs more than a thousand pounds.
Zeus Technology Ltd. - Zeus web server

For further information, refer Web server comparison on Wikipedia and Basic web servers on the World Wide Web Consortium web site (this list is outdated - that's why I have this article.

virtual server

virtual server

 

The physical server typically runs a Hypervisor which is tasked with creating, destroying, and managing the resources of "Guest" operating systems, or Virtual Machines. These guest operating systems are allocated a share of resources of the physical server, typically in a manner in which the guest is not aware of any other physical resources save for those allocated to it by the hypervisor.

The Guest system may be fully virtualized, paravirtualized, or a hybrid of the two. In a fully virtualized environment, the guest is presented with an emulated or virtualized set of hardware and is unaware that this hardware is not strictly physical. The hypervisor in this case must translate, map, and convert requests from the guest system into the appropriate resource requests on the host, resulting in significant overhead. Almost all systems can be virtualized using this method, as it requires no modification of the operating system, however a CPU supporting virtualization is required for most hypervisors that perform full virtualization.

In a paravirtualized environment, the guest is aware of the hypervisor and interfaces directly with the host system's resources, with the hypervisor implementing real-time access control and resource allocation. This results in near-native performance since the guest sees the same hardware as the host and can thus communicate with it natively. UNIX-like systems, such as Linux, some variants of BSD, Plan9, and OpenSolaris are currently known to support this method of virtualization. However, installing operating systems as paravirtualized guests tends to require more knowledge about the operating system in order to have it use special hypervisor-aware kernels and devices.

Some examples of paravirtualization-capable hypervisors are Xen, Virtuozzo, Vserver, and OpenVZ (which is the open source and development version of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers).

Hybrid or partial paravirtualization, is full virtualization, but in which the guest uses paravirtualized drivers for key components such as Networking and Disk I/O, resulting in greatly increased I/O performance. As such, it is a common solution for operating systems which cannot be modified (for various reasons) to support paravirtualiztion.