When purchasing a dedicated server, you are going to ask a lot of questions to your potential dedicated web host. Sometimes, though, you can find answers to the most common pre-sales questions via the dedicated web hosting company’s website, and this can help you make your decision or at least narrow down the options. Remember that dedicated hosting is different than shared web hosting in many ways, one of which includes the fact that dedicated servers can have customized setups. So even if the answer on their website is “no”, you should still ask, as most dedicated hosts will likely work with you if you are going to purchase with them or will help you find a way around your hosting dilemma.

And now for some helpful Dedicated Server Hosting FAQs and pre-sales answers!

How many websites can I host on my Dedicated Server?

The best dedicated web hosts will say “unlimited website hosting” is okay! This is because it is YOUR server! You own and control almost all aspects of it, except maintenance and storage.

Can I resell space on my Dedicated Server?

If your web host says anything but “yes”, you’re in trouble! Qualified dedicated server hosting providers will allow you to resell your dedicated server space to clients, friends, family, and even strangers. For example, if you wanted to run a “free web hosting” site, where you give thousands of customers small websites to host for free, you can do this easily by purchasing a dedicated server.

I don’t like the control panels offered – can I install my own or just work through SSH?

Yes and yes! Some web hosting providers will install control panels for you at a nominal charge, while all of them will allow you to install yourself or just use SSH/shell commands to cut down on costs or for simplicity.

How long does it take to get my Dedicated Server setup?

No longer than 24-48 hours, unless you have asked for something that is more difficult to setup. If you want your account setup ASAP, we always recommend calling the dedicated hosting provider so they can verify your information immediately for a faster setup.

You may be wondering why we would be talking about “small business web hosting” on a dedicated server website. You may think to yourself, if you’re only a small business, why would you need such a big server, storage space, RAM, or bandwidth?

Well, our answer to you is that small businesses can be just as resource-intensive as fortune 100 corporations! It might surprise you to know that millions of small businesses are purchasing dedicated servers every day, because even if they appear to be a small business to some spheres, in their local or national markets, they play like the big boys.

Think, for example, about your local supermarket. Hundreds if not thousands of people shop there daily. Maybe the supermarket has a couple sister supermarkets placed around the county or nearby cities, or maybe it’s a chain supermarket but only for the Eastern, Western, or Midwestern United States. If they need a website, they are not going to be using shared web hosting – they are going to be sitting on a dedicated server, because those thousands of customers will be visiting their website to print directions, get contact information, request the newsletter, or search for deals and discounts.

Small businesses may be ‘small’ by nature, but they can eat up resources just like the big boys. Consider the following things as a small business owner:

* Do you have more than 100 employees?
* Do you require a custom Content Management System to be developed for your website management needs?
* Do you have more than 100 customers?
* Do you offer more than 50 products? Or if you offer services, do these services include web-based services like email, management, design, SEO, or logo creation?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should consider dedicated server hosting.

JSP Web Hosting is all the rage in website scripting and programming. By utilizing the Java language and combining it with easy-to-use, open source, cross-browser-compatible XML tags, the JSP technology has surpassed its predecessor ASP to some experts by far.

For dedicated server hosting, using JSP on your server has many benefits.

What is JSP Hosting and what can you do with it?

JSP stands for Java Server Pages and more or less means you can use JSP to track unique visitors to your website, password protect specific pages or private areas, create popups and unders for advertising, rotate advertisements, and even acquire important presales information about your unique visitors like where they came from, what browser they are using, etc.

JSP usually costs a couple bucks extra to run on a shared server, but on your dedicated machine, you can run it however you like. For dedicated server hosting, JSP can be a valuable resource.

Overselling occurs when a webhost offers more storage per account than can actually fit on a single server. In shared web hosting, you host your website alongside 300-500 other websites on the same web server, housing all your content, pictures, files, music, as well as the contents of those 300-500 other websites. So if each person hosting on a shared server gets 2500GB, that’s 75,000GB of storage space necessary per server.

About 90% of the web hosts out there cannot support this. As mentioned previously, Lunarpages is one of the few exceptions, as their technology allows them to join servers and cluster them or move webmasters to new servers if they outgrow the space in shared hosting.

Above all, you should not only compare basic features like storage space but think about the technology backing up your choices. If you are really going to require 2500GB of storage space, you need dedicated server hosting.

Also remember that dedicated servers aren’t as expensive as they used to be and you can easily find dedicated hosting coupons everywhere, so if price is another reason you want to start out shared, give dedicated web hosting a try for a price you can afford.

One of the main things web hosting customers tend to compare from webhost to webhost is the amount of storage space the web hosting provider is offering. In a shared webhosting environment, it seems incredibly important, because most web hosts are similarly priced. For example, if one webhost offers 1500GB storage space and another offers Unlimited for the same price, you would tend to go with the one offering bigger storage allotments.

However, you need to know that webhosting storage space is limited. Unless you are hosting on a dedicated server (or several dedicated server clusters RAIDed together), there really is no such thing as unlimited storage space.

What these webhosts are offering is called overselling and most of the time it’s common practice. There are some web hosts who have been in the business for years and are actually technologically able to provide what they are preaching. For example, Lunarpages Web Hosting sells their Basic Hosting Plan with 1500GB Storage Space. This company has been in business since 1998, and they own thousands of web servers, so they are more than capable of backing up this kind of promise. However, most web hosting providers cannot support the amounts of storage space they offer, and they oversell their space.

One of the best ways I often recommend for people to get around the GFoC (Great Firewall of China) issues is to move towards Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated hosting.

On a shared hosting server where you might be sharing your hosting setup with anything from three hundred to four hundred (or maybe even more).  Your chances are higher that somebody on one of those dedicated hosting servers will get caught by the GFoC.  It is a simple math issue.

Now on a dedicated hosting server, you are on a server with fewer people.  Sometimes you may be the only other one on that machine.  So in turn, as far as the GFoC goes you are a needle in a proverbial haystack. 

Apache, or sometimes known as Apache HTTP server is one of those magical things that make the web go around.  If your server hosting was a picnic at the park, then Apache would be the blanket under that picnic meal. 

It is used to serve static and dynamic content from a server on the web.  Many of the Web’s applications are designed with Apache in mind or thanks to what it provides.  It is the web server component also of the popular LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, perl).  The biggest competitor to Apache is Microsoft’s IIS or Internet Information Services as it is sometimes called.

There is some debate as well on how Apache got it’s name.  Some people say it was named after the Indian tribe with the same name and others say that it was due to the project’s roots as a set of patches to the codebase of NCSA HTTPd 1.3 - making it “a patchy” server.

WordPress Web Hosting is one of the most popular choices for new webmasters these days, but it is also a viable choice for large enterprise bloggers and popular websites for affiliate websites, ecommerce, and more. As most bloggers will eventually outgrow Shared WebHosting, customers often upgrade to a dedicated server to host their WordPress website.

Even though WordPress is a blogging platform, most users these days use it as a content management system, as it easily integrates pictures, text, videos, ecommerce, and more into your site. It’s also incredibly easy to learn. It’s biggest competitor, Joomla, is best-suited for larger websites, while WordPress is easier to learn and adapt to. Both Joomla web hosting and WordPress webhosting are valuable choices if you are new to the website hosting world, as content management systems are becoming more and more popular.

The good thing about WordPress Web Hosting is that you have literally millions of incredible templates to work with and there are endless WordPress Theme Design contests that showcase the entries and even offer Free WordPress Themes for download.

Virtual Private Servers have become a great resource for semi-dedicated web hosting and for webmasters who have simply outgrown the shared web hosting market but for whatever reason cannot afford or are not ready to upgrade to dedicated server hosting.

So what is a Virtual Private Server (VPS)?

VPS web hosting is simply a dedicated server that is split into smaller shared web hosting sections. It differs from a shared server in that in shared hosting, you could be sharing the server with upwards of 500 different webmasters, which means that you get 1/500th of the server’s CPU. This is normally divided into less than 1% of the CPU and if you go over, your account is likely suspended from the web host until you fix the cause of the usage or upgrade to a plan that can support that kind of environment.

For virtual private server hosting, you are normally guaranteed a set portion of the server’s RAM and in some cases, you can go over this amount if the others sharing your server space don’t use their portion. The best VPS hosting providers will only put 25 people or less on your VPS web hosting plan with you – this gives you added freedoms to install applications and run more resource-intensive scripts which could have been potentially dangerous in a completely-shared environment.

VPS web hosting plans are normally much cheaper than dedicated web hosting plans. You can plan to pay anywhere between $40-80/month for a basic virtual private server web hosting plan.

**UPDATE: Lunarpages Web Hosting is offering a HUGE discount on their Windows VPS Web Hosting Plan. Normally priced at $69.95/month, they have lowered the price to $39.95/month, a complete bargain in this industry. This is a limited time promotion and no coupon code is necessary.**

Windows Dedicated Hosting plans don’t automatically come with a control panel, as you can access the server via SSH/Shell Commands if necessary. However, having a control panel allows you to do all the things you can do via Shell access but in an intuitive, often automated manner. This means that you don’t have to memorize shell commands or scripts but can deploy then with the click of a mouse.

The most adaptive and secure control panel for Windows Web Hosting is Plesk, a powerful control panel with many advantages over the competition.

So what are the advantages of Plesk for Windows Web Hosting?

In the Dedicated server or shared server sphere, Plesk has the same kinds of advantages, which include:

• Innovative & Easy Icon-Based Control Panel – this mean no fumbling for the proper commands; simply find the icon that describes what you want to do (create an email, deploy a script, add a subdomain) and click it

• Secure & Stable Interface – Plesk has the ability and has proven itself handling over 5 million domains around the world on thousands of accounts per server and contains some of the most powerful security measures in the industry

• Support for Multiple Platforms – That’s right, Plesk works on Windows and Linux! This is a huge deal in case you’re not sure which platform you need and takes away the fear of having to change the operating system later while your website is already running on a secure dedicated server

• Multilingual Support – Plesk is available in most languages, including English, German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Russian, so you should be able to make sure the control panel speaks your language

• Microsoft Server 2008 & Silverlight Support - With Plesk, you can use Microsoft Server 2008 Web Hosting and Microsoft Silverlight Web Hosting as well, as both are 100% compatible with this intuitive and affordable control panel