Dedicated Servers Explanation

When we speak of hosting servers, there are 3 main categories - shared website hosting servers, VPS (virtual web hosting servers) and dedicated servers. Shared hosting web servers accommodate many customers and thus the resources per hosting account are limited, virtual private server packages offer more server configuration independence, but also affect other VPSs on the hardware node if used rashly, and dedicated servers offer you the possibility to carry out everything you desire without messing with anyone else.

Why would you need a dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are usually much more high-priced than shared hosting servers or VPSs. Why would anyone, then, use them? The explanation is very simple. If your corporation has a data-heavy online portal, or simply has very specific server configuration requirements, the most logical option is a dedicated server. For someone who is ready to invest in security and stability, the greater price is of no importance. You are bestowed with full root privileges and can use 100% of the web server's system resources without anyone else availing of these system resources and meddling with your online portals.

Hardware specifications

The majority of shared hosting suppliers, including us at The Gate, provide different hardware configurations you can pick from as per your demands. The configurations offer different types of processors, a different amount of cores, different RAM and hard drive sizes and different monthly traffic allowances. You can pick a hosting Control Panel, which is a handy graphical user interface if you want to utilize the web hosting server for hosting purposes only and choose not to resort to an SSH console for all the changes you will be making. We provide three types of hosting CP software - Hepsia, DirectAdmin and cPanel.

The hosting Control Panel of your choosing

If you are a self-reliant Linux OS user (our dedicated hosting servers are powered by Linux or other Unix-based Operating Systems), you could administer your dedicated server via a Secure Shell client only. That, however, could be inconvenient, even more so if you choose to give root privileges to someone else who has less technical expertise than yourself. This is why having web hosting Control Panel software pre-installed is an excellent idea. The Hepsia hosting CP interface that we offer does not give you complete server root access and is chiefly suitable for somebody who has many websites that require lots of system resources, but would rather manage the web portals, databases and emails through an intuitive Control Panel. The DirectAdmin and cPanel hosting Control Panels, on the other hand, grant full server root access and include three access levels - root, reseller and user. If you intend to resell web hosting plans rather than using the web hosting server solely for yourself, you should pick one of these two.

Web server monitoring and backup services

Last but not least, there is the matter of monitoring the dedicated server and of backing it up. In case of a problem with your dedicated server, such as a non-responsive Apache or an outage, it is advisable to have some kind of monitoring platform activated. Here at The Gate 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 server too. Backups are also an additional option - the hosting vendor offers you data backups on our own backup servers. You could choose a kind of RAID that would allow you to save the same data on two server hard drives as a precaution in case of a server hard disk drive failure, or in case someone whom you have ranted complete root-level access erases something by mistake.