Dedicated Web Hosting Clarified

When we talk about hosting servers, there are 3 major categories - shared website hosting web servers, VPS (private virtual servers) and dedicated web hosting servers. Shared hosting servers accommodate multiple clients and hence the resources per user account are limited, virtual private server accounts offer more server configuration autonomy, but also influence other Virtual Private Servers on the hardware node if used imprudently, and dedicated servers give you the option to carry out everything you see fit without intervening with anyone else.

Why would you require a dedicated web hosting server?

Dedicated servers are generally much more expensive than shared web hosting servers or Virtual Private Servers. Why would anyone, then, use them? The explanation is quite simple. If your company has a content-heavy website, or just has very special server architecture requirements, the proper option is a dedicated server. For someone who is ready to invest in security and reliability, the bigger price is not a problem. You obtain complete root-level access and can use 100 percent of the hosting server's resources without anyone else using these resources and meddling with your websites.

Hardware specifications

The majority of website hosting firms, incl. us at Wantok Web Hosting, offer different hardware architectures you can pick from in keeping with your necessities. The configurations offer different types of microprocessors, a different amount of cores, different RAM and hard disk drive sizes and different monthly bandwidth quotas. You can choose a web hosting Control Panel, which is convenient software if you wish to utilize the dedicated hosting web server for website hosting purposes only and choose not to resort to a Secure Shell client for all the changes you will be making. We offer 3 kinds of web hosting Control Panel software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The Control Panel of your choosing

If you are a self-assured Linux OS user (our web hosting servers are running on Linux or other Unix-based OSs), you could manage your dedicated server via an SSH tunnel exclusively. That, however, could be inconvenient, even more so if you choose to give complete root-level access to someone else who has less technical experience than yourself. This is why having Control Panel software pre-activated is a splendid idea. The Hepsia hosting CP graphical user interface that we offer does not offer complete root-level access and is mainly appropriate for someone who has plenty of web pages that devour lots of system resources, but prefers to manage the sites, databases and email boxes through an easy-to-use Control Panel. The DirectAdmin and cPanel hosting CPs, on the other hand, give you complete root-level access and include 3 access levels - root, reseller and user. If you plan to resell web hosting plans instead of using the 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 web hosting server and of backing it up. In case of a predicament with your dedicated hosting server, like an unresponsive Apache or a network outage, it is desirable to have some sort of monitoring system activated. Here at Wantok Web Hosting the system administrators monitor all dedicated servers for ping timeouts, and, if you order a Managed Services upgrade, they monitor the individual services on the dedicated web hosting server as well. Backups are also an additional feature - the web hosting company offers you data backups on our own backup servers. You could choose a type of RAID that would allow you to have the very same data on two server disk drives as a protective measure in the event of a hard drive failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted full root privileges erases something by mistake.