An Operating System is the software that interacts with the hardware of a computer system and works as the intermediary between all the applications and the hardware, including peripheral devices such as a printer, a computer mouse or a keyboard. When you run software, it transmits requests to the OS through an API (Application Program Interface) and the contact is done via a command line or a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Identical to a personal computer, web hosting servers also have an Operating System which acts as a host for all of the software installed on them, including script applications or server-side software such as a flash server, a VOIP server, and many others. A virtual machine can be created on a physical one, so you could install a guest OS on it and have a different system environment compared to the physical server host Operating System.
Multiple OS in Dedicated Servers
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 are freely available so they will not increase the low price of your new web hosting server, but also because they are exceptionally stable and secure. Each of them is backed up by a huge community of web developers, so you will be able to choose from countless software packages that you may 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 hosting Control Panel you can use as the Control Panels that we offer are compatible with specific OSs only and since we would like to give you as much flexibility as possible, we offer several OSs and multiple Control Panels. In case you choose a server with a given OS, we will change it upon request in case it turns out that you will need a different one. We could also keep the OS updated on a weekly basis as part of the additional Managed Services upgrade.