An Operating System is the basic software which controls a computer. It takes care of how your hardware functions, the communication with peripherals for instance a monitor, a printer or a keyboard, the allocation of memory between your applications, and the prioritization of apps when multiple ones run at once. Any program that is installed on a laptop or a desktop works by sending requests to the OS for different services using an application program interface (API). The communication with the OS can be achieved using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) or a command line. In the web hosting field, the Operating System is what runs a web hosting server together with any software installed on it, which includes not only website scripts, but, in addition every other application for instance a VOIP or a game server. When there are virtual machines created, they employ a guest OS that is run on the server host OS.
Multiple OS in Dedicated Web 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're completely free so they won't increase the cost of your new server, but also because they are extremely stable and secure. Each one of them is backed up by a huge community of developers, so you will be able to choose from many hundreds of software packages that you may install on your server in case the application that you would like to employ has certain requirements. The Operating System will also determine what web hosting Control Panel you can use as the Control Panels that we offer run on specific OSs only and because we want to give you as much versatility as possible, we offer several OSs and multiple Control Panels. If you choose a server with a given Operating System, we could change it upon request in the event that it turns out that you'll need another one. We can also keep your OS updated on a weekly basis as part of our useful Managed Services upgrade.