Three factors which decide the operating system on a Dedicated Servers are availability, employee familiarity and price. Many of the Linux (Open Source operating system) flavors are included at no charge to the customer. Red Hat is the only commercial flavor of Linux which requires a monthly fee basis. The monthly fee is used to provide the OS updates through the Red Hat Network using an application called up2date. Other flavors of Linux can be added from the community of opens source at no charge. Some flavors of Linux used are Fedora Core, Debian, CentOS and many others Linux Distributions or BSD systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD. For Commercially available operating systems Microsoft Windows is the most preferred one. It can be included on the server with the help of special program called SPLA. Other than Microsoft Windows and Linux the operating system used on the dedicated severs is Mac OS X.

Although Microsoft Windows has got a larger fan base because of its user friendly GUI (graphical user interface), but on the dedicated servers Linux and Mac are chosen first. This happens because Mac and Linux are less susceptible to viruses, Trojans and worms. Due to the absence of security bugs to develop, it makes Mac and Linux a dependable and solid web hosting for bloggers. Majority of the dedicated web servers are powered by Linux followed by Windows, Unix, and a few by Mac. Thus Making Mac a less likely to be hacked by hackers. However, Mac is less famous because of the high prices.

Support is a big deciding factor for the dedicated hosting servers as is directly depends on the level of management offered with any particular dedicated server package. Operating system support needs strict attention. For the support of the operating system it includes updates to the core system. Normally these updates released to acquire latest patches, security patches, and system-wide weakness resolutions. Major upgrades include service packs, kernel upgrades security patches to keep server safe and secure, and application updates. These operating system updates are important because along with support help in relieves the load of server management from the dedicated server owner.

Though users can avail almost all the above mentioned OS’s over Cheap VPS Hosting packages as well.