The fact that a website owner does not need to concern themselves with the worry of slow to load pages or excessive downtime is especially important for a business website. In this way dedicated server hosting provides a great advantage to businesses that utilize this form of hosting. The quicker a business page is to load and the less it is offline, the more likely the website is to be successful. If the page was offline a great deal or had problems loading a business could lose customers. This is not going to happen often with dedicated server hosting.

Although dedicated server hosting is a more expensive option than shared hosting, there are many advantages to the use of a dedicated server. Dedicated servers can be an especially good option for business websites. This form of hosting will typically provide the highest level of performance and security.

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Because it has become such a coveted service, many companies are offering managed dedicated server hosting. As with any business decision, consumers need to be cautious and exercise wisdom when choosing a dedicated server hosting company. There are sites on the Internet where business managers can read evaluations of various providers of managed dedicated server web hosting services. These reviews can be an excellent first place to look. The word of friends or business acquaintances who have had good experiences with various hosts will be helpful as well. Finally, the old standby, the Better Business Bureau will provide any negative reports that have been made about the company under consideration. “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold.

Any business can expand their customer base through the use of managed dedicated server web hosting. No matter how good the product or service offered is, it won’t sell without advertisement. There are a lot of means for advertising at your disposal, but a website is probably the most efficient of all in thiss day of the Internet.

The new industry standard is for 24/7 availability. Managers seeking a host company should settle for nothing less. Another feature to consider is the availability of an auto installer. Auto installers will save time when installing a forum, image gallery, or content management system. Depending on where the company is in their website development process, they may need to determine and register a domain name. Name recognition plays such an important role in marketing a business, so protecting the website name is an important service the managed dedicated hosting provider should offer. Again, investigate the pricing options of this service. Often, a discount is provided if the domain name is registered for several years at at time, as opposed to on an annual basis.

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While both Windows and Linux operating systems are capable of delivering quality performance for various requirements, there are some distinguishing characteristics that are worth noting for anyone seeking the right OS. A comparison of the Windows dedicated servers and Linux solutions will yield several distinctions that will help determine which OS is best for a particular company. The Linux operating system is a generally free or open source OS that was designed by Linus Tervalds with other help from global developers. It is a cheaper way of running servers than on more expensive dedicated Windows servers and is known for its high performance and relatively streamlined, dependable functionality. The global community that appreciates cheap, open sources systems prefers Linux and continues to be enthused about this option because of its almost attack-free security, easier customization capability, and performance reliability.

Even though Linux has many features that are appealing to users around the world, it has not managed to become as user friendly as a Microsoft based OS. Linux has made great strides in recent years to close the gap with easier solutions to systems operations, but Windows dedicated servers still provide the best in user-friendly options and continue to lead the pack among novice or seasoned users. Microsoft operating systems are a closed source OS and are more expensive to operate than Linux. However, it offers a broader array of utilities and software than does Linux which makes it much more appealing than the more basic Linux systems. Microsoft continues to develop and improve their systems and to retain a competitive edge in games, software and other computer variants.

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Most data centers, like WebHosting.UK.com offer dedicated servers in three different areas.

Economy-Standard-Heavy Load -

Here is what you usually get:

ECONOMY DEDICATED SERVER: Good for individuals or people who have outgrown hosting but don’t need anything too fancy.

£79 / Month Dedicated Server - usually last year’s model - these tend to be Dual Core Intel Core 2 Duo servers with hard drives tend to be 160 gigs or higher — often IDE since IDE was popular up until even 1 year ago. Of course- SATA is at least 20% faster.

STANDARD DEDICATED SERVER: Good for everything including game servers

£ 99 / Month Dedicated server- these are the bread and butter servers today- usually Dual Core Intel Xeon with 2.33 GHz 4 MB cache and 160 GIG SATA drive. The 3.2ghz servers today often have DDR2 ram which is 20% faster then DDR ram- so make sure you get DDR2 ram - at least 1 gig (1024mb) if possible when ordering a dedicated server.

HEAVY LOAD DEDICATED SERVER: - for people with heavy traffic or BIG data bases that get hit hard.

£119 to £ 260 / Month dedicated server— these are usually Quad Core Intel Xeon servers– tend to be 2.13ghz -2.4ghz in price -soon the Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon 205ghz Xeons will be about this price too.

These tend to be useful for MULTIPLE game servers and big data bases and heavy loads. I do not recommend the extra expense unless you KNOW you need it as DUAL XEON or DUAL CPU type dedicated servers are not necessarily faster unless you have huge loads - particularly loads like tons of sql queries or tons of visitors at once.

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Basic Server
This server configuration will power many domains as well as any special dedicated server software that you install. Make it SCSI: For an additional £150 setup / £50 monthly this configuration can be made with a SCSI drives.

Advanced Server
Our most popular server for the startup ISP or reseller looking to move to a server. This machine will serve well over 500 average domains and at the same time power mail, DNS, SQL, PHP, mail servers and more, without bogging down the system.
Make it SCSI: For an additional £150 setup / £99 monthly this configuration can be made with a SCSI drives.

Max Server
This server is used by many customers as additions to their dedicated rack. It will serve a growing customer base as well as any demanding server applications that may be installed on it. Customers planning on moving many domains or demanding server applications should strongly consider this option to begin with. The SCSI hard drives provide fast and reliable access for hardware intensive database software such as MS SQL server

High Usage Server - Full T-1 Bandwidth Provided
The High Usage Server is very identical in configuration to those used by WebHosting UK for its Virtual web hosting. The High Bandwidth Servers will power a full class C’s worth of Virtual Accounts as well as power almost any server software you can throw at it. The High Usage Server utilized the most powerful hardware available at the time of construction.

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With this release Microsoft has certainly met a very high standard in the big four criteria: security, reliability, scalability, and performance. In addition, for some organizations Microsoft getting it right means having the correct special features. It also means competing with an industry-leading ease of use and the right pricing.

To meet these requirements, Windows Server 2003 is delivered in several editions, Web, Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter, that have different capacities and price tags.

Along with the Windows dedicated Server 2003 Microsoft also created the .NET framework for application development. Programmers will discover that this server, along with its built-in application server elements and the revamped Web server, are a particularly effective environment for .NET applications. Provided, of course, that Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the development tool of choice.

Being an evolution of NT & Win2K, Windows 2003 has retained most of the stable features of the previous two editions & is miles ahead of them in terms of reliability, stability & features. However it is still not in the same league as FreeBSD or NetBSD when it comes to mission critical applications. With a wide range of development tools & addons available for the Windows platform, Win 2003 is still one of the ‘easier’ OSs to deploy and use. But when it comes to price-tags, it is probably the most expensive server OS system available.

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The Windows 2000, based on the NT platform was a improvement over the latter. Faster, more resource efficient & stable than NT, it had been reorganized and rationalized. The highlight of Win2K was the Active Directory system. An operating system directory service provides the means to record and organize the resources of a network (people, computers,and peripherals), control their security, and monitor their operation. This information becomes much more accessible in Active Directory and is used throughout the operating system. It is also required for features such as Kerberos authentication.

Windows 2000 Server bundled the IIS dedicated server into the package. It was faster, more robust than before. Also part of the Internet/intranet package is support for multimedia, including Windows Multimedia Services, Windows Quality of Service (to ensure that streaming multimedia receives necessary bandwidth), Resource Reservation Protocol, and asynchronous transfer mode support.

There were many performance enhancements in Windows 2000 Server. A good deal of code optimizing was also done resulting in an improvement of 10% to 20% over NT. There were four service packs released for Win2K which addressed a number of security, stability & other issues that were encountered.

With the release of Windows Server 2003 earlier this year and after nearly four years in the marketplace, Microsoft has announced that Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Window 2000 Server Client Access Licenses (CALs) will be retired in phases. Customers who are in need of a copy of Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server can obtain a copy of Windows Server 2003 and exercise their downgrade rights.

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Windows NT Server 4.0 was both a development and deployment platform. The other part of the equation was that overall, Windows NT Server 4.0 works pretty well as an Internet platform, especially on a small-scale or departmental intranet level.

Most of Microsoft’s claims regarding Windows NT as a dedicated server were related directly to Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0, which was bundled as part of the operating system. IIS was integrated with Windows NT Directory Services, making it easier to develop and integrate Web-based applications. IIS also integrated with other Microsoft tools: FrontPage, Microsoft Transaction Server, Microsoft Message Queue, Visual InterDev, various back-end tools, and Site Server.

But NT was not an OS for running mission critical servers. It lacked the stability and reliability of many of the Unix or Linux flavors. Though it did not dominate the server OS market, it did offer a option other than the Linux / Unix platforms. Over the years, 6 service packs were released , along with numerous patches and fixes to address the reliability problems.

The OS has been officially retired by Microsoft & effective January 1, 2005, Premier, pay-per-incident and security update support will no longer be available for Windows NT Server 4.0 (Standard, Enterprise Edition, and Terminal Server Edition).

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