Every single notebook or desktop or web server is run by an Operating System - the low-level program that interacts with the computer hardware, including peripheral devices such as a mouse or a printer, as well as any apps that are currently installed on your system. Any program input using 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 server, each and every app runs within the parameters set by the OS as well - priority, physical memory, processing time, and so on. 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 separate Operating Systems, called guest OS and host OS, so that you will be able to set up a different software environment on a single machine.
Multiple OS in Dedicated Servers Hosting
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 are totally free and they won't increase the cost of your new hosting server, but also because they are extremely secure and stable. Each one of them is backed up by a big community of web developers, so you'll be able to choose from countless software packages that you may install on your server in case the application that you want 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 particular OSs only and since we would like to provide you with as much flexibility as possible, we offer a couple of OSs and multiple Control Panels. If you get a server with a certain Operating System, we could change it upon request if it turns out that you need alternative one. We can also keep the OS updated weekly as part of the optional Managed Services upgrade.