Dedicated Hosting Definition

When we speak of hosting web servers, there are 3 main categories - shared hosting web servers, VPS (virtual private web hosting servers) and dedicated servers. Shared web hosting servers host a lot of clients and therefore the system resources per web hosting account are restricted, virtual private server accounts give you more configuration autonomy, but also affect other private virtual servers on the hardware node if utilized rashly, and dedicated servers give you the independence to do everything you want without intervening with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are traditionally much more expensive than shared hosting web servers or private virtual servers. Why would anyone, then, use them? The answer is quite simple. If your corporation has a heavy resource-devouring web site, or simply has very special server architecture requirements, the most appropriate choice is a dedicated server. For someone who is ready to invest in security and dependability, the higher price is not a concern. You receive full root-level access and can use 100% of the server's resources without anyone else using these resources and intervening with your web pages.

Hardware configurations

The majority of shared hosting companies, incl. us at Step2Ray's Website Hosting, provide different hardware architectures you can select from based on your necessities. The hardware configurations offer different varieties of processors, a different number of cores, different RAM and hard disk sizes and different web traffic usage quotas. You can pick a hosting Control Panel, which is a useful interface if you would like to utilize the web hosting server for website hosting purposes solely and prefer not to use an SSH console for all the changes you will be making. We provide three kinds of web hosting CP software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The hosting CP of your preference

If you are a confident Linux OS user (our dedicated servers are running on Linux or other Unix-based OSs), you could manage your dedicated server via SSH exclusively. That, however, could be inconvenient, even more so if you decide to give access to someone else who has less technical proficiency than yourself. This is why having hosting CP software activated is an intelligent idea. The Hepsia Control Panel user interface that we provide does not give you full server root privileges and is chiefly appropriate for somebody who has a lot of sites that absorb plenty of system resources, but wishes to manage the web sites, databases and email addresses via an intuitive hosting Control Panel. The DirectAdmin and cPanel web hosting CPs, on the other hand, grant full server root access and include 3 levels of access - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell hosting accounts instead of utilizing the dedicated server solely for yourself, you should choose one of these two.

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 server, like a non-responsive Apache or an outage, it is desirable to have some sort of monitoring platform enabled. Here at Step2Ray's Website 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 as well. Backups are also an additional option - the hosting company offers you data backups on our own backup web servers. You could choose a type of RAID that would permit you to keep the very same data on 2 server hard disks as a precaution in case of a server hard disk drive failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted full root access erases something by accident.