What Exactly are Dedicated Servers?

When we speak of web hosting servers, there are three main types - hosting servers, VPS (private virtual hosting servers) and dedicated servers. Shared web hosting servers host many clients and hence the resources per user account are restricted, VPS give you more server configuration independence, but also influence other Virtual Private Servers on the hardware node if used heedlessly, and dedicated servers offer you the autonomy to perform everything you prefer without intervening with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated servers?

Dedicated servers are commonly much more expensive than shared hosting servers or private virtual servers. Why would anyone, then, want to use them? The answer is rather simple. If your company has a large-scale web page, or just has very explicit web server setup requirements, the most sensible choice would be a dedicated servers. For somebody who is prepared to invest in security and dependability, the higher price is of no concern. You get full server root access and can use 100% of the physical server's system resources without anyone else sharing these resources and interfering with your web pages.

Hardware architectures

Most website hosting providers, including us at Melanesia Web Hosting, offer several different hardware configurations you can pick from in accordance with your demands. The hardware architectures include different varieties of processors, a different amount of cores, different RAM and hard disk drive sizes and different web traffic usage quotas. You can choose a web hosting Control Panel, which is a useful tool if you wish to utilize the dedicated servers for website hosting purposes only and choose not to use an SSH client for all the modifications you will be making. We offer 3 sorts of hosting CP software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The Control Panel of your preference

If you are a self-confident Linux user (our web servers are powered by Linux or other Unix-based OSs), you could administer your dedicated servers through an SSH client only. That, though, could be awkward, particularly if you wish to give root privileges to someone else who has less technical abilities than yourself. That is why having web hosting CP software installed is a clever idea. The Hepsia hosting CP interface that we offer does not include complete root access and is chiefly suitable for someone who maintains many web pages that devour lots of system resources, but would like to manage the web pages, databases and mail aliases via an intuitive web hosting CP. The DirectAdmin and cPanel hosting Control Panels, on the other hand, give you complete server root access and offer three access levels - root, reseller and user. If you intend to resell web hosting plans instead of using the dedicated servers only for yourself, you should choose one of these two.

Web server monitoring and backup procedures

Last but not least, there is the matter of monitoring the dedicated servers and of backing it up. In case of a problem with your server, such as a non-responsive Apache or a downtime, it is good to have some kind of monitoring platform enabled. Here at Melanesia 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 servers too. Backups are also an additional feature - the web hosting distributor offers you data backups on our own backup web servers. You could choose a kind of RAID that would allow you to keep the very same data on 2 hard disk drives as a protective measure in case of a server hard drive failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted full root privileges erases something by accident.