How Dedicated Servers Work

When we speak of hosting servers, there are 3 main varieties - shared website hosting web servers, VPS (virtual web servers) and dedicated servers. Shared web servers host many clients and therefore the resources per account are restricted, virtual private server packages give you more configuration independence, but also influence other virtual private hosting servers on the hardware node if utilized rashly, and dedicated servers offer you the liberty to do everything you please without messing with anyone else.

Why would you require a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are normally much more high-priced than shared web hosting servers or virtual private hosting servers. Why would anyone, then, want to use them? The explanation is very simple. If your corporation has a high resource-absorbing website, or simply has very exact web server setup requirements, the best choice would be a dedicated server. For someone who is inclined to invest in security and reliability, the bigger price is not an issue. You gain complete server root access and can utilize 100 percent of the dedicated hosting web server's system resources without anyone else availing of these system resources and messing with your web portals.

Hardware specs

The majority of web hosting distributors, incl. us at WANTOK Web Hosting, offer several different hardware configurations you can pick from in accordance with your requirements. The configurations include different sorts of microprocessors, a different number of cores, different RAM and hard disk drive sizes and different monthly traffic allowances. You can choose a hosting Control Panel, which is a useful GUI if you want to utilize the dedicated web hosting server for website hosting purposes only and choose not to use an SSH terminal for all the changes you will be making. We provide three kinds of hosting CP software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The hosting Control Panel of your choice

If you are a self-reliant Linux OS user (our dedicated hosting servers are powered by Linux or other Unix-based OSs), you could administer your dedicated server via a Secure Shell connection only. That, though, could be awkward, particularly if you choose to grant root-level access to somebody else who has less technical skills than yourself. This is why having web hosting Control Panel software installed is a bright idea. The Hepsia hosting CP tool that we offer does not give you root-level access and is chiefly suitable for somebody who has multiple web portals that consume a lot of system resources, but wants to administer the web pages, databases and email box accounts through an intuitive web hosting CP. The DirectAdmin and cPanel hosting Control Panels, on the other hand, grant root access and have 3 levels of access - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell web hosting packages instead of using the dedicated web hosting server just for yourself, you should select one of these two.

Web server monitoring and backup services

Last but not least, there is the issue of monitoring the dedicated server and of backing it up. In case of a problem with your web hosting server, such as an unresponsive Apache or an outage, it is desirable to have some sort of monitoring system activated. Here at WANTOK Web Hosting the system administrators monitor all dedicated servers for ping timeouts, and, if you order a Managed Services upgrade, they monitor the separate services on the dedicated server too. Backups are also an additional option - the web hosting distributor offers you data backups on our own backup servers. You could select a type of RAID that would permit you to keep the same data on 2 server disk drives as a protective measure in case of a server hard drive failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted full server root privileges erases something accidentally.