What Precisely are Dedicated Servers?

When we speak of hosting web servers, there are 3 basic kinds - shared web hosting web servers, VPS (private virtual web servers) and dedicated servers. Shared web servers accommodate a lot of clients and thus the system resources per user account are limited, VPS packages give you more configuration independence, but also affect other VPS servers on the hardware node if used imprudently, and dedicated servers offer you the option to do everything you want without messing with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are generally much more high-priced than shared web hosting servers or VPS servers. Why would anyone, then, use them? The explanation is rather simple. If your company has a heavy resource-devouring web portal, or simply has very precise server architecture requirements, the most logical choice is a dedicated server. For somebody who is prepared to invest in safety and stability, the greater price is not a problem. You have full root privileges and can utilize 100 percent of the hosting server's system resources without anyone else using these resources and interfering with your sites.

Hardware specs

Most hosting corporations, incl. us at DNMark.com, provide several different hardware configurations you can select from in line with your necessities. The hardware architectures include different types of processors, a different number of cores, different RAM memory and hard disk sizes and different bandwidth quotas. You can select a web hosting Control Panel, which is a handy GUI if you would like to use the dedicated web hosting server for hosting purposes only and choose not to resort to an SSH console for all the modifications you will be making. We provide 3 kinds of web hosting CP software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The hosting Control Panel of your choosing

If you are a self-confident Linux user (our web servers are running on Linux or other Unix-based Operating Systems), you could administer your dedicated server via a Secure Shell connection only. That, however, could be inconvenient, especially if you choose to grant full root access to somebody else who has less technical expertise than yourself. This is why having web hosting CP software activated is a great idea. The Hepsia hosting CP interface that we offer does not include complete server root access and is mainly appropriate for somebody who has lots of web pages that swallow a lot of resources, but wishes to administer the web sites, databases and e-mail accounts through an intuitive hosting CP. The DirectAdmin and cPanel web hosting CPs, on the other hand, grant full root access and include 3 access levels - root, reseller and user. If you intend to resell web hosting packages instead of using the dedicated hosting server only 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 predicament with your dedicated hosting server, such as a non-responsive Apache or a network outage, it is good to have some kind of monitoring platform enabled. Here at DNMark.com 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 extra option - the hosting vendor offers you data backups on our own backup web servers. You could pick a kind of RAID that would allow you to save the 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 given root-level access deletes something by accident.