Dedicated server hosting

Dedicated server hosting is an excellent type of managed hosting service that is aimed at clients who have websites that they need hosted in a high visitor traffic environment. Dedicated hosting allows the client much more control of the technology that underpins their website than is available to clients who use shared hosting packages.

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Dedicated server hosting is more flexible because it gives you full control over the server, giving you the choice of operating system, hardware configuration, upgrade and maintenance schedules, without affecting any other hosting clients. You lease the whole server, so you don't have to own your own machine (an arrangement typified by colocation services) but you can often leave maintenance in the hands of the hosting company as an inclusive or add-on service. For some clients a dedicated server offers a better return on investment (ROI) for a lower overall cost, giving a higher level of uptime and reliability.

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Your choice of a reliable data center becomes crucial, making sure that your hosting company has redundant power supplies and reliable HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration). Customers seeking scalable space and bandwidth will find that dedicated hosting gives maximum flexibility, with minimum client involvement.

What are the options when you decide to buy dedicated server hosting?

The most obvious difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting is that you are in full control of your choice of operating system, so you will be able to select the best operating system to match your needs. Your decision is likely to be based on price, your familiarity with the coding environment, the availability of developers for the particular platform that you choose. Usually FreeBSD, Linux, and the variations that you will find on that platform are often offered for free, while Windows carries an additional fee to cover the licence cost.

You need to think about the connectivity that your hosting provider gives you. Budget dedicated server hosts sometimes have just a single upstream provider, whereas more established higher quality providers usually have multiple upstream providers, providing higher levels of redundancy. This additional connectivity can sometimes make the difference between your site being available more or less all the time, and being down frequently, which many customers quite rightly feel is unacceptable.

High quality dedicated hosting providers are often multi-homed across multiple quality uplink providers so that if one goes down they still have routes to and from the Internet, with the capability to potentially improve routes and maximise their available server bandwidth.

Administrative dedicated server maintenance of the operating system, including upgrades, security patches, daemon updates are included provided, and you might be able to select your preferred software. The management services that you have may enable you to add users, domains, daemon configuration, or even implement custom programming.

It is normal for dedicated hosting providers to disallow IRC (eggdrops, clients or daemons) because rogue IRC users can trigger DDoS attacks against the provider, which may overwhelm their networks, lowering service quality for all customers. Distributed Denial of Service brute force attacks flood the target with an overwhelming flux of packets, oversaturating its connection bandwidth or depleting the target's system resources. Bandwidth-saturating floods rely on the attacker having higher bandwidth available than the victim.

Adult content is often not allowed by many hosting providers because it may be of questionable legality and often consumes unacceptably large amounts of bandwidth.

Likewise, spam is usually prohibited by the hosting provider's Acceptable Use Policy.

Other extra features that can often be provided with dedicated servers include Serial Console or KVM/IP which is used to access a server if the user is unable to get in using normal means such as SSH, and allows the server to be recovered from boot-time configuration faults like filesystem recovery. You may also have the ability to perform an automated restore of OS (Operating System) which restores the server to its original configuration. Remote Backup Space, SSH and FTP space are often provided to allow you to back up data that you store on your dedicated server.