Are ports 80 and 8080 the same?

Question

What is the difference between port 80 and port 8080?

Answer 1

Port 80 is the default port for HTTP.

Port 8080 is a port that is frequently used for proxy servers, a "debug" server, or occasionally an "admin" server.

Answer 2

On most operating systems, IP ports < 1024 are restricted to a privilege class (like Administrator or superuser or root) and so Joe User cannot bind a server to them. Since 8080 > 1024 and sorta sounds like 80, people have used it for testing purposes or when they don't have necessary privilege.

Answer 3

There is no association between them except that 8080 is fairly common for things like proxy servers, or alternative site urls - simply because it is easy to remember (compared to standard direct http over 80).

Answer 4

No, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers

80 - (TCP/UDP) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

8080 - (TCP) HTTP alternate (http_alt)—commonly used for Web proxy and caching server, or for running a Web server as a non-root user

Answer 5

On Unix-like systems, port 80 is privileged, meaning that only root can open sockets to listen on that port. Port 8080 lies above the privileged range and unprivileged users are allowed to create listening sockets on that port.

Answer 6

Ports ranges are from 0 to 65535, ($0000 - $ffff) the lower 1024 ($0400) is normally reserved for static services (globally registered services).

• Look here for overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers

Any portnumber could be used for anything, but if you want compatibilty, I would recommend anyone to follow the stardards.

The lower portnumbers are called "static ports" where as when you open a connection you get a dynamic portnumber back from most services.

• Port 25 is SMTP
• Port 20/21 is FTP(+data)
• Port 80 is HTTP
• Port 110 is POP3

... and so on.

But if you decide to put eg. a webserver on port 8080 or 8000 or something similar, then you usually place a proxy server or some other kinda of filtering mechanism (firewall, content validator or something) - because you wish to block port 80.

As of my knowledge, this is a common practice in large enterprises/companies as they want to minimize potential virus and system breakdowns.

Again, they could as easily have used port 11 or port 81, but many hardware supplieres block a lot of the usual ports in the firewalls by default. Whereas the higher ports are often open from beginning.

So .. my guess in this case would be that port 8080 is a proxy (intelligent cache server), but it could also just be a load balancing server (redirecting traffic to the right webserver)

Hope this was of any help?