An Operating System is the software which communicates with the hardware of a computer and is the intermediary between applications and the hardware, including peripheral devices such as a printer, a mouse or a keyboard. When you run software, it transmits requests to the OS through an API (Application Program Interface) and the interaction is done via a command line or a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Identical to a personal computer, web servers also feature an Operating System that serves as a host for the software installed on them, which includes script applications or server-side software such as a flash server, a VOIP server, etcetera. A virtual machine can be created on a physical one, so you'll be able to install a guest OS on it and have a different system environment compared to the physical server host OS.
Multiple OS in VPS Hosting
If you choose to acquire one of our virtual private server plans, you shall be able to opt for one of the three Linux distributions which we supply for the Operating System of the servers - CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. These are among the most widely used and most stable server OSs available and we offer them in order to give you a choice for the software environment of your machine if you would like to install some application with specific requirements in terms of the packages that need to be present on the web hosting server. We also offer three hosting Control Panels and which one of them you could use will depend on the OS that you've chosen. We leave the option to replace the server Operating System open, so when you want to use an app that requires an OS different from the one you already have, we can always reinstall the VPS. In addition, we can keep the OS up-to-date weekly by installing all of the security updates which may be released.
Multiple OS in Dedicated Web Hosting
We offer three Operating Systems with our dedicated server plans - CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. They're all different Linux distributions and we offer them not only because they're 100 % free so they won't increase the price of your new hosting server, but also because they are exceptionally stable and secure. Each of them is backed up by a large community of web developers, so you'll be able to choose from countless 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 web hosting Control Panel you can use because the Control Panels that we offer are compatible with particular OSs only and because we would like to provide you with as much versatility as possible, we offer multiple 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 need a different one. We will also keep the OS updated on a weekly basis as a part of our useful Managed Services upgrade.