An Operating System is the low-level software that manages a computer system. It takes care of how your hardware operates, the communication with peripherals like a monitor, a printer or a keyboard, the allocation of memory between your applications, and the prioritization of apps when several run at the same time. Any program which is installed on a desktop or a laptop functions by sending requests to the OS for various services via an application program interface (API). The interaction with the OS is possible via a Graphical User Interface (GUI) or a command line. In the web hosting field, the Operating System is what controls a web hosting server and all the software installed on it, which includes not only website scripts, but, in addition every other application for example a VOIP or a game server. If there are virtual machines created, they employ a guest OS that runs on the server host OS.
Multiple OS in Dedicated Hosting
We offer three Operating Systems with our dedicated server solutions - CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. They're all different Linux distributions and we offer them not only because they are totally free so they won't increase the price of your new hosting server, but also because they are very stable and secure. Each of them is supported by a big community of developers, so you'll be given the option to choose from thousands of software packages that you could install on your server if the app that you intend to work with has certain requirements. The Operating System will also determine what web hosting Control Panel you can use because the Control Panels that we offer are compatible with specific OSs only and because we would like to give you as much flexibility as possible, we offer multiple OSs and multiple Control Panels. If you get a server with a given Operating System, we could change it upon request if it turns out that you will need another one. We could also keep the OS updated weekly as a part of our additional Managed Services upgrade.