Each and every personal computer or server is run by an Operating System - the low-level program that interacts with the hardware equipment, including peripherals such as a mouse and a printer, along with any apps that are present on your system. Any program input through 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, each and every application runs within the parameters specified by the OS as well - priority, physical memory, processing time, etcetera. This is valid for both standard website scripts and server-side software such as a media server. If a virtual server is set up on a physical one, there can be two independent Operating Systems, referred to as guest OS and host OS, so you will be able to set up a different software environment on the very same machine.
Multiple OS in VPS Servers
In case you select one of our VPS server plans, you'll have three different Operating Systems to pick from - CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu. They're all Linux releases and we offer them instead of offering just a single OS, since the applications that you may want to run on the server could have specific requirements for the software environment. Each one of these three has certain advantages regarding the available plans that you can later on install, but what's common between them is that they're very secure and reliable and have huge communities that support them. The internet hosting Control Panel options for the VPS accounts depend on your OS choice, so as to give you more flexibility. In case you order the virtual server with one OS and you need another one later, our tech support team can easily reinstall the VPS with the new one in a matter of minutes. We also offer you the option to maintain the Operating System on your server up-to-date on a weekly basis.
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're freely available so they will not increase the low price of your new server, but also because they are very secure and stable. Each one of them is supported by a big community of web developers, so you'll be able to choose from a myriad of software packages that you could install on your server in case the application that you would like to work with has specific requirements. The Operating System will also determine what hosting Control Panel you can use because the Control Panels that we offer run on particular OSs only and because we would like to give you as much flexibility as possible, we offer a couple of OSs and multiple Control Panels. In case you get a server with a given OS, we will change it upon request in case it turns out that you need a different one. We can also keep the OS updated weekly as part of the useful Managed Services upgrade.