An Operating System is the software which interacts with the hardware of a PC and is the intermediary between applications and the hardware, including peripheral devices such as a printer, a computer mouse or a keyboard. When you run an app, it sends requests to the OS through an API (Application Program Interface) and the interaction is done through a command line or a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Just like a personal computer, web servers also have an Operating System which serves as a host for all the software installed on them, which includes script applications or server-side software such as a flash server, a VOIP server, and many others. A virtual machine can be generated on a physical one, so you can install a guest OS on it and have a different system environment in contrast to the physical server host OS.

Multiple OS in Dedicated Servers

We offer three Operating Systems with our dedicated server solutions - CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. They are all different Linux distributions and we offer them not only because they are completely free and they won't increase the low price of your new web hosting server, but also because they are really stable and secure. Each of them is backed up by a large community of web developers, so you'll be able to choose from a myriad of software packages that you could install on your server if the application that you want to use has certain requirements. The Operating System will also determine what web hosting Control Panel you can use as the Control Panels that we offer are compatible with specific OSs only and because we want to give you as much flexibility as possible, we offer several OSs and multiple Control Panels. If you choose a server with a certain Operating System, we will change it upon request if it turns out that you will need a different one. We can also keep your OS updated weekly as a part of the optional Managed Services upgrade.