Dedicated Servers Definition

When we speak of hosting web servers, there are three basic types - shared hosting servers, VPS (private virtual servers) and dedicated servers. Shared web servers accommodate many clients and thus the system resources per user account are limited, VPS packages give you more server configuration freedom, but also affect other VPS web servers on the hardware node if used imprudently, and dedicated servers give you the chance to carry out everything you decide without interfering with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are traditionally much more expensive than shared servers or VPS web servers. Why would anyone, then, use them? The answer is very simple. If your company has a heavy resource-consuming website, or simply has very exact web server architecture requirements, the right option would be a dedicated server. For someone who is willing to invest in safety and stability, the bigger price is of no concern. You are granted full root privileges and can use 100% of the server's resources without anyone else using these system resources and intervening with your sites.

Hardware architectures

Most hosting service providers, including us at 2U2 Web Hosting, provide several hardware configurations you can select from in accordance with your demands. The configurations include different kinds of microprocessors, a different amount of cores, different RAM and disk drive sizes and different bandwidth usage quotas. You can choose a web hosting CP, which is a handy GUI if you want to use the dedicated hosting web server for web hosting purposes solely and prefer not to use an SSH client for all the modifications you will be making. We offer 3 kinds of hosting Control Panel software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The web hosting CP of your preference

If you are a confident Linux user (our dedicated web hosting servers are running on Linux or other Unix-based OSs), you could manage your dedicated server through a Secure Shell connection exclusively. That, though, could be inconvenient, even more so if you wish to give full root privileges to somebody else who has less technical expertise than yourself. This is why having web hosting Control Panel software pre-activated is an excellent idea. The Hepsia web hosting Control Panel GUI that we offer does not give you complete root access and is chiefly appropriate for someone who owns a lot of online portals that swallow a lot of resources, but prefers to manage the web sites, databases and e-mail accounts using a user-friendly hosting CP. The DirectAdmin and cPanel web hosting Control Panels, on the other hand, give you complete server root access and have 3 levels of access - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell web hosting accounts instead of utilizing the dedicated hosting web server solely for yourself, you should select one of these two.

Web server monitoring and backup procedures

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 web server, such as an unresponsive Apache or a network outage, it is good to have some sort of monitoring platform enabled. Here at 2U2 Web 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 extra option - the hosting services provider offers you data backups on our own backup servers. You could pick a kind of RAID that would allow you to keep the same data on two server hard drives as a precaution in case of a disk drive failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted root privileges erases something by accident.