Dedicated Web Servers
by Jimmy Martin
If a website uses too many server resources to stay in shared or VPS hosting, it must use a dedicated server. This means that the website has a server all to itself. All of the memory and hard disk space is available to the website at all times. You don't have to worry about other sites using up resources and slowing down or crashing the server.
Modern web servers have an enormous amount of resources available. A dedicated server will cater for a very heavily used website, or one that places great demands on resources, such as a site that makes heavy use of databases.
Figure 4: Dedicated Web Server Overview
Figure 4 above shows an overview of a dedicated web server. You might recognize it from Figure 1. The server in the diagram is a LAMP server, as it is running Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Although this is a very common configuration, a dedicated web server can run any operating system and software that you want. Other operating systems (OS's) that are often used are Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and FreeBSD. Less common OS's that are sometimes used for webserving include OpenBSD, Apple OS X Server and Sun Solaris.
The software run on the server can also be chosen from a wide range. Alternatives to the Apache server program include Lighttpd and Microsoft Internet Information Server (Windows only). Alternatives to the PHP programming language include Perl, Python, Ruby and Java. Windows servers can also be programmed in Visual Basic.NET and C#. Available databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server (Windows only).
Dedicated servers can also run email server programs, group collaboration software, or even act as online game servers. The decision is entirely up to you. This means a dedicated server is an incredibly flexible option.
Obviously, this comes at a price. There is nobody else to share the cost with. You must also either pay to have the server managed for you (installing security updates, etc.) or manage the server yourself. It is also possible to buy your own server and have it "co-located" in somebody else's data centre.
Next we will look at some of the Pros and Cons of Dedicated Server Web Hosting