How Dedicated Servers Function

When we talk about hosting servers, there are 3 main categories - shared hosting web servers, VPS (private virtual hosting servers) and dedicated servers. Shared hosting servers host many customers and therefore the resources per hosting account are restricted, VPS accounts offer more server configuration freedom, but also affect other VPSs on the hardware node if utilized unwisely, and dedicated servers offer you the opportunity to perform everything you choose without interfering with anyone else.

Why would you require a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are normally much more expensive than shared hosting servers or VPSs. Why would anyone, then, want to use them? The reply is quite simple. If your firm has a high resource-swallowing web page, or just has very explicit web server configuration requirements, the most reasonable choice would be a dedicated server. For somebody who is ready to invest in safety and reliability, the higher price is of no concern. You get complete root-level access and can utilize 100% of the hosting web server's resources without anyone else utilizing these resources and meddling with your web sites.

Hardware configurations

Most hosting corporations, incl. us at WebCenter Hosting, offer different hardware configurations you can choose from in line with your needs. The configurations offer different varieties of processors, a different number of cores, different RAM memory and server hard disk drive sizes and different monthly traffic usage quotas. You can pick a web hosting Control Panel, which is a useful interface if you wish to use the dedicated hosting web server for web hosting purposes solely and choose not to use an SSH terminal for all the modifications you will be making. We provide three sorts of hosting Control Panel software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The web hosting CP of your choosing

If you are a self-confident Linux OS user (our dedicated web hosting servers are powered by Linux or other Unix-based Operating Systems), you could administer your dedicated server through a Secure Shell client exclusively. That, however, could be awkward, particularly if you decide to grant complete root-level access to somebody else who has less technical skills than yourself. This is why having web hosting CP software pre-activated is a nice idea. The Hepsia web hosting CP GUI that we provide does not include full root access and is chiefly suitable for somebody who owns lots of web sites that devour plenty of system resources, but would rather manage the sites, databases and e-mailbox accounts through an intuitive web hosting Control Panel. The DirectAdmin and cPanel web hosting Control Panels, on the other hand, give you root privileges and offer 3 access levels - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell hosting accounts rather than using the web server only for yourself, you should pick one of these two.

Server monitoring and backup procedures

Last but not least, there is the issue of monitoring the dedicated server and of backing it up. In case of a predicament with your dedicated hosting web server, such as a non-responsive Apache or a network downtime, it is good to have some kind of monitoring platform enabled. Here at WebCenter Hosting the system administrators monitor all dedicated servers for ping timeouts, and, if you have a Managed Services package, they monitor the separate services on the dedicated server as well. Backups are also a bonus feature - the hosting services provider offers you data backups on our own backup web servers. You could select a kind of RAID that would permit you to have the very same data on two hard drives as a precaution in case of a hard disk failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted root-level access erases something accidentally.