Dedicated web hosting means your hosting account is the only account on a specific machine. One computer resides somewhere on the Internet and is used exclusively for your hosting needs. When you log into the machine, you have unlimited access to the system in a similar fashion to the computer you use at your home or office. You can add, remove, customize, and compile virtually any application. You can access any file on the system, change permissions and ownership of files, and perform all the tasks you would expect with unlimited access.
There is, however, a serious drawback to using a dedicated server: cost. Since you are the only person using the machine, the price is usually quite high. Extremely busy sites or very large companies need these dedicated servers for their web operations, but most companies do not. Here's why. If you are thinking about a dedicated server, you are most likely looking for one of two options: high-capacity processing or root access.
If you need a machine that can process thousands of transactions per second and handle millions of visitors, you might need a dedicated web server where you are the only user of the system's processor, memory, and storage resources. Most of our customers, however, need root access to their server to perform certain tasks, and since there can only be one root account per server, they assume an expensive dedicated machine is the only solution. However, their needs would be serviced just as well, at a fraction of the cost, with a dedicated operating system, and that is precisely what our dedicated server provide.