When you connect to www.howstuffworks.com to read a page, you are a user sitting at a client's machine. You are accessing the HowStuffWorks Web server. The server machine finds the page you requested and sends it to you. Clients that come to a server machine do so with a specific intent, so clients direct their requests to a specific software server running on the server machine. For example, if you are running a Web browser on your machine, it will want to talk to the Web server on the server machine, not the e-mail server