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Unmanaged Dedicated Servers are servers which are leased to the public by the
vendor, given a connection to the internet, and left alone. Since the vendor doesn't have
to tend to them, they can be leased more cheaply than a managed server. Those wishing to
rent an unmanaged server should ensure that they do their homework, and learn something
about system administration before getting their server. A leased server will come with
an operating system installed, but hackers are constantly finding vulnerabilities within
the default installations of operating systems, so the safest systems are usually those
which have had all of the OS vendor's patches applied. In the case of the unmanaged server,
the onus is on the customer to make sure that this has been done.
As if this business of managed versus unmanaged servers wasn't complicated
enough, another course of action to consider is to lease an unmanaged server, but then hire
a management company to ensure that it has been set up safely and securely, and to perform
regular maintenance on it. Since "management" can mean different things to different people,
you may find that a certain company will sell servers as "managed", but won't perform certain
tasks that another company will as part of the management package. If you find a freelance
management company, you can contract them to work with your machine no matter where it's located.
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