Friday, December 26, 2008

Managed Dedicated Hosting for Your Business

By Ben Ingham

A business will often outgrow shared web hosting and it will need its own managed dedicated hosting server. Unmanaged Dedicated hosting, is a type of hosting in which you rent your own server from a dedicated hosting company. This company will maintain a stock of servers and operate its own data center and network. The server is for your exclusive use only, meaning it does not share resources with other users or websites.

You will need some technical experience with web servers or you may struggle to perform your own server management and admin tasks. If your company doesn't possess the in house technical experience, you could consider hiring a system administrator to carry out these tasks if you feel your your company requires a dedicated server. There are many freelancing sites such as elance where you could advertise for additional help and many business allow you to outsource your server administration work.

With Managed dedicated hosting the web hosting provider will provide ongoing technical support and basic system help. They should have engineers nearby on a 24 hour basis in order to carry out server reboots. You still have complete technical control over your dedicated server, and unlike shared hosting, this server is devoted entirely to your own use. Additionally you will also have access to optional managed services such as software upgrades, security patching, operating system hardening, firewalls, and backup services

Dedicated hosting providers usually offer a choice of operating systems which are usually Windows 2003 and Linux (Centos, Ubuntu, Fedora etc). This will be installed by the web host when the server is first commissioned. To assist in the management of the server the managed hosting provider will often install a control panel. The most popular control panels are Cpanel (Web Host Manager) Plesk, Helm and H-Sphere. This makes managing your server and carrying out routine tasks much easier and is a time saver. If this is a Linux server this will often require command line expertise. A server without a control panel or graphical interface is sometimes known as a "root server."

There are a wide variety of dedicated server providers. Whether you decide to rent an unmanaged or a managed server, carry out thorough research before coming to a decision. Online review sites and forums are helpful to research the various hosting companies and find out what each offers, as are customer testimonials. If they claim 24/7/365 support, make sure they can actually provide it. As with most things in life, always go for quality of service rather than price, because with dedicated server hosting, you usually get what you pay for! - 16928

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