Has it ever happened to you? You attempt to boot up a server instance in the language of your choice (Javascript, Ruby, Python) and you get an error:
Error: A server is already running!
Not too much a problem, you probably just forgot to properly shutdown your server last time you were workring on your personal project. On your local machine the work of finding the still running process isn't too difficult. If you use a Mac like me, you can simply check through the open terminal instances you have running as most manual processes shutdown when you close your terminal.
But maybe you're not trying to boot up a server on your local machine, maybe your server lives in a warehouse of physical servers somewhere very far away on a cloud hosting platform like Heroku or AWS EC2. Worse still, you can't just look in your code and see which port number your server listens to because your software's port is randomly assigned by your cloud hosting provider!
Not to fear!