What are Dedicated Servers?

When we talk about hosting web servers, there are 3 principal varieties - shared website hosting servers, VPS (virtual hosting servers) and dedicated servers. Shared hosting servers accommodate multiple customers and so the resources per account are restricted, virtual private server accounts give you more server configuration freedom, but also influence other virtual private web servers on the hardware node if utilized rashly, and dedicated servers give you the liberty to perform everything you want without interfering with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are commonly much more expensive than shared web servers or virtual private web servers. Why would anyone, then, want to use them? The answer is quite simple. If your corporation has a large-scale online portal, or simply has very precise server setup requirements, the most reasonable option would be a dedicated server. For somebody who is prepared to invest in safety and stability, the higher price is not a problem. You are bestowed with root privileges and can use 100% of the dedicated web hosting server's resources without anyone else sharing these system resources and messing with your web pages.

Hardware specs

Most shared hosting distributors, incl. us at Explore Hosting, offer several different hardware architectures you can select from based on your demands. The hardware architectures include different types of microprocessors, a different amount of cores, different RAM and server hard disk sizes and different traffic quotas. You can choose a hosting Control Panel, which is a useful software tool if you want to utilize the dedicated hosting server for website hosting purposes only and prefer not to resort to an SSH console for all the changes you will be making. We offer 3 kinds of web hosting CP software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The hosting CP of your choosing

If you are a self-assured Linux OS user (our dedicated servers are powered by Linux or other Unix-based OSs), you could administer your dedicated server through an SSH tunnel only. That, however, could be awkward, especially if you decide to grant access to somebody else who has less technical abilities than yourself. This is why having web hosting CP software pre-installed is a good idea. The Hepsia web hosting Control Panel GUI that we offer does not offer complete root-level access and is chiefly appropriate for somebody who runs numerous sites that devour lots of system resources, but wishes to manage the web pages, databases and email box accounts using an intuitive web hosting CP. The DirectAdmin and cPanel web hosting Control Panels, on the other hand, grant root privileges and include 3 levels of access - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell web hosting plans rather than using the dedicated web hosting server just for yourself, you should pick one of these two.

Web server monitoring and backup procedures

Last but not least, there is the issue of monitoring the dedicated server and of backing it up. In the event of a problem with your web hosting server, such as an unresponsive Apache or an outage, it is good to have some kind of monitoring system enabled. Here at Explore Hosting the system administrators monitor all dedicated servers for ping timeouts, and, if you have a Managed Services package, they monitor the individual services on the dedicated server too. Backups are also an additional feature - the hosting vendor offers you data backups on our own backup servers. You could select a type of RAID that would permit you to have the very same data on two server hard disk drives as a protective measure in case of a server hard disk failure, or in case someone whom you have given full root privileges erases something by accident.