What is Dedicated Hosting?

When we speak of hosting web servers, there are three major types - shared hosting servers, VPS (virtual hosting servers) and dedicated servers. Shared web servers host plenty of clients and therefore the resources per user account are limited, virtual private servers give you more server configuration freedom, but also affect other private virtual web hosting servers on the hardware node if utilized rashly, and dedicated servers give you the chance to perform everything you decide without interfering with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated servers?

Dedicated servers are normally much more expensive than shared servers or virtual web hosting servers. Why would anyone, then, want to use them? The reply is very simple. If your company has a regularly visited web portal, or simply has very exact server architecture requirements, the most logical option would be a dedicated servers. For someone who is ready to invest in security and dependability, the bigger price is not a concern. You are granted complete server root access and can utilize 100 percent of the dedicated hosting web server's resources without anyone else utilizing these resources and interfering with your sites.

Hardware architectures

Most website hosting vendors, including us at Step2Ray's Website Hosting, provide different hardware configurations you can select from in consonance with your requirements. The hardware architectures include different kinds of microprocessors, a different amount of cores, different RAM and disk drive sizes and different traffic quotas. You can choose a hosting Control Panel, which is a convenient GUI if you want to utilize the dedicated servers for website hosting purposes solely and prefer not to resort to a Secure Shell terminal for all the modifications you will be making. We provide 3 kinds of Control Panel software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The hosting Control Panel of your preference

If you are a confident Linux user (our dedicated hosting web servers are powered by Linux or other Unix-based Operating Systems), you could administer your dedicated servers through an SSH tunnel only. That, however, could be inconvenient, particularly if you wish to give full root privileges to someone else who has less technical abilities than yourself. That is why having web hosting CP software pre-installed is a great idea. The Hepsia hosting CP interface that we provide does not give you full server root access and is chiefly appropriate for someone who owns many sites that require lots of system resources, but wishes to administer the web portals, databases and e-mail aliases through a user-friendly Control Panel. The DirectAdmin and cPanel web hosting CPs, on the other hand, grant root-level access and have 3 levels of access - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell hosting packages rather than utilizing the dedicated servers just for yourself, you should select 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 the event of a predicament with your hosting server, like a non-responsive Apache or a downtime, it is useful to have some kind of monitoring system 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 servers too. Backups are also an extra option - the web hosting services provider offers you data backups on our own backup web servers. You could choose a type of RAID that would allow you to save the very same data on two disk drives as a protective measure in the event of a hard drive failure, or in case someone whom you have given access deletes something unintentionally.