Every desktop or notebook or web server is run by an Operating System - the low-level program that interacts with the hardware equipment, including peripherals such as a mouse or a printer, together with any apps that are present on your system. Any program input using a command line or a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is processed by sending an Application Program Interface (API) request to the Operating System. On a web server, any application runs within the parameters defined by the OS as well - priority, physical memory, processing time, and so on. This is valid for both standard website scripts and server-side software like a media server. If a virtual server is generated on a physical one, there can be two different Operating Systems, named guest OS and host OS, so that you'll be able to set up a different software environment on a single machine.

Multiple OS in Dedicated Servers

We offer three Operating Systems with our dedicated server plans - CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. They are all different Linux distributions and we offer them not only because they're freely available and they will not increase the low price of your new server, but also because they are exceptionally stable and secure. Each of them is backed up by a huge community of web developers, so you will be able to choose from a large number software packages that you can install on your server if the application that you intend to work with has certain requirements. The Operating System will also determine what internet hosting Control Panel you can use because the Control Panels that we offer are compatible with particular OSs only and since we want to provide you with as much versatility as possible, we offer multiple OSs and multiple Control Panels. If you choose a server with a certain OS, we can change it upon request in case it turns out that you will need a different one. We could also keep the OS updated weekly as part of our optional Managed Services upgrade.