So, what is a “hosted” terminal server? Well hosting is a term in computing where a company hosts a computer or a service in their data centre rather than the customer having to purchase and maintain their own computer. The applications like Word are on the Terminal Server right next to the File Server, so performance is really quick, and the people remotely running them can be anywhere. You could have 30 or 40 users connected running Word on the Windows terminal server at the same time all in their own bubbles called remote desktop connection user sessions all managed by a service called a session manager. The other big advantage of a terminal server is that it allows lots of users to remote control it at the same time, connecting using an RDP Client built in to Windows operating system. This remote control concept is what is at the heart of a Windows terminal server it has the applications, the users just remote control it. In return the keyboard and mouse clicks are even tinier. The data contained in a view of the computers screen is tiny compared with the whole document and in the scheme of things it doesn’t change very much, no matter how fast you type. The answer to this problem is to run Word on a computer (server) in London and just send the screen view of it across the network to remote machine in Edinburgh. In this organisation everyone wants to share information, but if the files are held on a file server in London then it is going to be painfully slow for the guys on remote computers in Edinburgh to use Microsoft Word to open, edit and save Word documents, especially if the document is large and contains lots of graphics. If you’re wondering why that would be better than using programs running on your PC, imagine you work for an organisation with branches or sites across the country. A modern terminal server works in the same way, all the applications run on the computer running the Terminal Server Service rather than on the PC you might use to connect to it over a TCP IP network like your local area network or even over the internet.
In the old days of green screen terminals there were no applications running on the terminal, everything ran on the big old mainframe in the next building. They were renamed Remote Desktop Servers with Microsoft Windows Server 2008, but actually the dumb terminal concept is quite appropriate when trying to explain “what is a terminal server”.
Terminal Servers on the other hand is a bit of an archaic term and goes back to the time when people used “dumb” terminals. Web servers serve up websites, file servers give access to files and folders, print servers manage the printing of documents and so on. Computer “servers” tend to perform a specific function.
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