Once you have chosen on obtaining your business dedicated server, you need to decide on the server operating system which can depend on the availability, cost and employee expertise.

Unlike the desktop world Microsoft have overwhelming market share. There is a multiplicity of open source operating systems including Linux and FreeBSD. These are often bundled at no extra charge to the customer. Commercial operating systems such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or 2008, can be installed on the server if the dedicated server hoster has a Microsoft SPLA agreement.

Red Hat Enterprise is a commercial version of Linux or RHEL offered to hosting providers on a monthly fee basis. However you can use the a RHEL derivative known as Centos which has free updates. With Red Hat there is a subscription which provides for OS updates through the Red Hat Network using an application called up2date which is rpm based

Other operating systems are available from the open source community at no cost. These include CentOS, Fedora Core, Debian, and many other Linux distributions or BSD Unixsystems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.

Typical support for any of the operating systems above depends on the type of supervision offered with a particular dedicated server package. Operating system support may include updates to the core system in order to that the latest patches and security fixes are installed.

It is quite common on non-Microsoft Servers to be provided with a control panel to manage the server, especially if the server is required for web hosting. Cpanel which includes Web Host Manager (WHM) allows for the upgrade of the core operationg system as well as the routine admin tasks.