What Actually are Dedicated Hosting Servers?

When we speak of hosting servers, there are 3 basic categories — shared hosting servers, VPS (Virtual Private Servers), and dedicated hosting. Shared web hosting servers host many customers and accordingly, the resources per account are limited. VPS hosting offers more configuration freedom, but can also influence other VPS servers on the hardware. If utilized rashly, this can have a negative effect on all users. Dedicated hosting servers provide the autonomy to perform anything you see fit without intervention to or from anyone else.

Why dedicated hosting?

Dedicated hosting servers are commonly much more expensive than shared servers or private virtual hosting servers. Why would anyone choose them? The answer is simple… if your organization has resource-intensive applications running, or just has very specific server architecture requirements, the most logical option is a dedicated server. For anyone inclined to invest in security and dependability, the bigger price is not a concern. You have full root privileges and can utilize 100% of the dedicated hosting server's resources without the possibility of anyone else availing themselves of those resources and negatively affecting your websites.

Hardware architectures

Most website hosting suppliers, incluluding us at The Whole Internet, provide several different hardware architectures to choose from in harmony with your requirements. The configurations offer a choice of CPUs, a varying number of cores, different RAM and drive sizes, as well as different monthly bandwidth allowances. You can select a hosting control panel, which is a vital user interface if you intend to utilize the dedicated servers for hosting purposes only and prefer not to resort to SSH for all the changes you will be making.

The Control Panel of your choice

If you are a confident Linux OS user (our servers are all powered by Linux or other Unix-based operating systems), you could administer your dedicated hosting via SSH only. Going the FTP/SSH route could be risky however, particularly if you choose to give root-level access to someone with less technical skills than yourself. Our ‘Hepsia’ control panel does not provide complete server root access (intentionally) and is chiefly suitable for someone responsible for many resource-heavy websites, but desires to administer those sites, databases, and mail accounts with an easy-to-use control panel. The DirectAdmin and cPanel hosting CPs on the other hand, grant complete root access and include three levels of access — root, reseller, and user. If you intend to resell web hosting plans rather than using the dedicated hosting servers solely for your own use, you should select one of these two.

Server monitoring and backup services

Last but not least, there is the issue of monitoring the dedicated hosting servers and of backing them up. In case of a predicament with your dedicated web hosting server, such as an unresponsive Apache or an outage, it is desirable to have some sort of monitoring platform enabled. Unlikely as it may be, it can happen. Here at The Whole Internet the system administrators monitor all dedicated hosting servers for ping timeouts, and if you have a Managed Services package, they monitor the separate services on the dedicated hosting servers as well. Backups are also an additional feature — the hosting provider can offer you data backups on our own backup servers. You could select a type of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) that would allow you to store identical data on two disk drives as a protective measure in case of a hard drive failure, or in case someone whom you have given full server root access deletes something by accident.