If you are planning to host your website on a Microsoft Windows Operating System, you have several choices in you dedicated server hosting options.

While all 3 options run on Server 2003, there are different features and reasons you’d want to choose one over the other.

The first option you’ll run into would be Microsoft Windows 2003 Web Edition. This is the cheapest OS you will find but it is also the most limited. On Windows 2003 Web Edition, you are limited to support only up to 2GB RAM. This is fine for most small websites, small business sites, or other websites of small size. Though you cannot run it as a file or printer server, this may not be important for your dedicated server, so you could still use Web Edition easily.

The only real downfall is that you cannot run MS SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition on 2003 Web Edition. MS SQL 2005 is very important for database-heavy websites, so if you are planning to run a database server, you’ll want to choose 2003 Standard Edition or 2003 Enterprise Edition for your dedicated server.