What’s behind those 2 magic words: "web server"?

Web server is just like a computer you are probably reading this article on. Because most servers are controlled remotely, your average server will have a couple peripherals such as monitor, keyboard, and mouse “missing”.

Relatively small form factor allows servers to be stored in racks, where you can conveniently fit dozens if not hundreds of servers. When you have so many computers running at the same time, you obviously need a lot of resources to power, cool, and connect them all to the internet. Data centers (DC) have it all and that is where most reliable servers reside. DCs are reliable because they not only have constant power supply and internet connection, but most modern data centers are also protected against fires, earthquakes, and other hazards.

At Host1Plus we have our servers conveniently located in 6 different countries at 4 different partner data centers. And we’re not done yet — our network will expand together with our clients’ expectations.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that you can’t actually have a web server tucked away somewhere in your attic or under the table. As a matter of fact, even your regular computer can also act as a web server. However, for simplicity let’s just focus on real web servers in real data centers.

Just like in desktop and laptop computers, there’s a constant “battle” between server operating systems (OS). However, unlike the desktop computer market, Microsoft is not a winner here and Apple is barely visible. So who’s the winner? You’ve got it — Linux! Based on April 2009 Web Server Survey carried out by Netcraft, 45.95% out of 231,510,169 surveyed sites are running on Linux servers and 29.27% are running on Microsoft’s platforms.

At this point it is probably fair to notice that Linux is not a single OS, but rather a whole range, including Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, and others. Of course, Microsoft also has several versions of Windows Server Edition, but each of the Linux distributions mentioned above has separate companies behind them, so they can focus their resources more efficiently.

Our choice of server OS is CentOS, which, unlike certain other Linux server OSes is free, allowing us to offer our clients competitive prices.

Servers can be shared, dedicated, or virtual dedicated. Shared servers are most common. When your site is hosted on a shared server, it means that there are many other clients you are sharing resources with. Depending on server’s technical characteristics it can host from a couple dozen to hundreds of clients at the same time.

Virtual dedicated server is one where you will still be sharing physical server’s resources such as RAM and hard disk space with other clients, but each of you will have a separate virtual OS at your disposal.

Finally, as you might have guessed already, having a dedicated server means you have the whole physical machine to yourself. This is of course a rather pricy service and it is not necessary for most of the regular web needs.

Despite the fact that OS is one of the most important things in any computer, most web server users will never have to deal with server OS themselves. To make things easy, there are dedicated software packages that allow clients to control their hosting account directly from their browser.

Most common web control panels are Plesk, cPanel, and DirectAdmin. If you search Google for which of those control panels is the best, you may become even more confused — there are as many opinions as there are people.

However, it seems that people tend to agree on a couple of things. One of them being complexity / feature ratio for those 3. Plesk, which we use, probably has most features, but it is also rather complex, especially for someone who has never used a control panel before. DirectAdmin is the easiest to get to know, but it also lacks many features that the other two can offer. cPanel is a great balance between features and ease of use and we are planning to offer it to our clients soon.

Which is your preferred web control panel? What about server OS? Let us know in the comments.