A "Chicago Dedicated Server" is a physical (bare metal) or virtual computing instance housed in a data center located in the Chicago Miami metropolitan area (Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metropolitan area) that is used by a single tenant.

Both Chicago physical and virtual dedicated servers should be able to run any Linux operating system (OS) distribution or Microsoft Windows-based OS. Dedicated servers by default should offer secure and private access to the computing OS environment, have on-demand configured firewalls. Standard security practices include, but are not limited to, using strong passwords, SSH keys, and two-factor authentication.

A "Chicago Dedicated Hosting Provider" is a company that offers dedicated hosting services from data centers located in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metropolitan area Metropolitan area.

Many large Tier 3 and Tier 4 facilities owned by Equinix, Digital Realty, CoreSite, DataBank, Digital Realty, 365 Data Centers, Lumen, CyrusOne, Aligned Data Centers, QTS, Stream Data Centers, Centersquare, NTT Global, Netrality Data Centers, T5 Data Centers, TierPoint, and others are located in the Chicago metro area. These facilities enable cloud infrastructure providers to deliver application services to the entire Chicagoland with an average round-trip latency of 1 ms to 3 ms.

If you deliver content or application services nationwide in the U.S. and all over North America, Chicago is a strategic location for hosting infrastructure.

From a network perspective, Chicago data centers offer low latency to any point in the Americas. This means that users in the Central United States will experience lower round-trip delays when accessing your hosted content and applications compared to many other major U.S. cloud infrastructure hubs, such as Atlanta, Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York.

Having a dedicated cloud infrastructure or bare metal servers in Chicago is worth it, as it is one of the largest internet exchange hubs in the U.S. and North America. Thousands of networks interconnect and improve their connectivity in Chicago's internet exchange points.

Several variables influence the performance of a Chicago dedicated server. These include the physical location of the users, the bandwidth rate of the internet connection port, the computing resources necessary for the installed software to run properly, and how the apps are installed and configured.

An important trend in cloud computing, particularly in dedicated server infrastructure delivery, is "edge hosting." With edge hosting, dedicated servers are physically close to users of the configured software applications. From a networking perspective, the improved performance of a dedicated server hosted in a Chicago data center means that it is an edge server with latency of less than 5 milliseconds between application users and the hosted apps.

Yes, all dedicated servers hosted in our Chicago data centers offer the lowest possible round-trip delay throughout North America.
Our Bare Metal Edge Servers, which are hosted at 350 E. Cermak Road and 1432 S. Clinton Street in Chicago, as well as at 2101 Roberts Drive in Broadview, IL, feature the following round-trip delay (RTT) in milliseconds (ms):

• Ashburn, VA: 21 ms - 22 ms
• Kansas City, MO: 13 ms - 14 ms
• New York, NY: 16 ms - 17 ms
• Dallas, TX: 21 ms - 22 ms
• Denver, CO: 21 ms - 23 ms
• Los Angeles, CA: 45 ms - 46 ms
• Santa Clara, CA: 47 ms - 49 ms
• San Francisco, CA: 46 ms - 48 ms
• Seattle, WA: 44 ms - 46 ms
• Montreal, QC, Canada: 31 ms - 34 ms
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands: 98 ms - 101 ms
• Frankfurt, Germany: 97 ms - 99 ms
• London UK, Germany: 86 ms - 87 ms
• Madrid, Spain: 99 ms - 101 ms
• Milan, Italy: 105 ms - 107 ms
• Paris, France: 87 ms - 88 ms
• Viena, Austria: 111 ms - 114 ms
• Dubai, UAE: 196 ms - 198 ms
• Mumbai, india: 243 ms - 245 ms
• Tokyo, Japan: 162 ms - 164 ms
• Hong Kong: 177 ms - 179 ms
• Singapore: 214 ms - 217 ms
• Sydney, Australia: 215 ms - 216 ms
• Santiago, Chile: 134 ms - 136 ms
• Sao Paulo, Brazil: 132 ms - 135 ms

HC's Miami dedicated servers help you to deliver application services with low latency to any point in North and South America. They feature unlimited data transfer to the capacity of the bandwidth port, thus saving you thousands of dollars on internet traffic.

Bare metal servers and dedicated cloud hosting infrastructure providers, particularly those in Chicago, offer the following levels of security with their dedicated hosting services:

1. Physical Environment Security
Physical environment security refers to all physical aspects of the Chicago data center facilities used to house servers. This includes the resilience against natural disasters, the physical design of the data center and the way the server rooms and cabinets are organized, as well as power redundancy, Internet network redundancy, and overall business continuity.

2. Network Security
Network security is part of the overall data center communications architecture. It includes the redundancy of fiber connectivity routes and the wide choice of ISPs and interconnection options.

3. Physical Server Security
This can also be referred to as "Bare Metal Server Security". It refers to the specific hardware components and configurations of the server that increase its uptime. These include the number of power supplies (PSUs) used, the number and capacity of network interface cards (NICs), the number and specification of hard drives used (SATA, SAS, SSD, NMVe, etc.), the use of RAID controllers, the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI, also known as ILO and iDrac by server vendors) for remote network access to the Miami-based server, etc.

As a provider of Chicago Bare Metal Servers, Hostcolor automatically covers the highest possible industry standards regarding "Physical Environment Security" and "Network Security". Physical Server Security is a customizable element of the dedicated hosting server that is selected by the user of the physical server (i.e. the customer).
Most of our Chicago dedicated servers include the following "Physical Server Security" by default:

• Redundant Power Supplies (PSUs)
• Two 1 Gbps or two 10 Gbps physical Network Interface Cards (NICs)
• Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and IPMI capabilities. However, Chicago Edge servers are only provided with SSH management access and cannot be recovered in the event of an operating system (OS) failure that renders the server inoperable.

The type of firewall depends on the operating system used on your Chicago dedicated server. If your server uses a Linux operating system, one of the most popular firewall choices is Iptables.

Iptables is a user-space utility in Linux used to configure and manage the Netfilter firewall. Netfilter itself is a packet filter and firewall implemented in the standard Linux kernel. It allows administrators to control network traffic by defining rules for filtering, translating, and altering packets.

Other popular software firewall choices include Firewalld, IPFire, OPNsense, and pfSense, as well as underlying tools such as Iptables, Nftables, and UFW. IPFire, OPNsense, and pfSense are open-source firewall distributions.

Firewalld is a firewall management tool used by Red Hat Linux operating systems, including AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. It provides firewall features by acting as a front end for the Linux kernel's Netfilter framework. The current default backend for Firewalld is Nftables.

If your server is installed with Ubuntu OS, you can use UFW firewall. One of the UFW's benefits is that it offers a command-line interface and a graphical interface (Gufw) that are much easier to understand and use than directly interacting with Iptables.

The Windows Defender Firewall is the most popular firewall for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Other widely used software firewalls for the Windows OS include ZoneAlarm Free Firewall, GlassWire, TinyWall, and Comodo Firewall. Many other software firewalls are also sold under commercial licenses on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis.

Yes, if by "unlimited bandwidth" you mean no restrictions on incoming and outgoing Internet traffic and no charges for data transfer used. Each dedicated server in Chicago comes with a certain virtual or physical capacity of the Internet connection port, chosen by the server user. It varies from 250 Mbps to 100 Gbps. There are no limitations or restrictions on the used bandwidth used or data transfer quotas, up to the capacity of the Internet connection port, selected by our clients. Unless otherwise specified, all dedicated servers in Chicago offered by HostColor feature "unlimited bandwidth up to the capacity of the Internet connection port". This is also called "unmetered bandwidth", which is actually a more appropriate term to use.
"Unmetered Bandwidth" or "dedicated server with unmetered bandwidth" means that the hosting provider does not measure the bandwidth used by the server. In Chicago and most of its other Edge data center locations HostColor allows its customers to use the full capacity of the physical Internet bandwidth port of their dedicated servers.

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks typically result in service unavailability and thousands of dollars in data transfer service fees, especially if you host your IT infrastructure with one of the major hyperscale cloud providers.
HostColor's DDoS-protected dedicated servers in Chicago minimize the risk of service unavailability and virtually eliminate the risk of you incurring data transfer costs as a result of artificial, bot-generated traffic to your server instances.
When you use our Chicago dedicated servers, your applications run behind sophisticated DDoS protection firewalls, maximizing application availability. Our natural, enterprise-grade, DDoS-protected networks safeguard your Dallas dedicated server from unexpected network downtime, preventing loss of business and revenue. Our DDoS-protected network services filter out malicious traffic and ensure that legitimate traffic requests reach your servers and applications. Specifically, our DDoS protection includes the following capabilities:

• Real-time mitigation of malicious attacks
• Human-generated traffic that reaches your Chicagro dedicated server
• Native protection against network attacks of any size
• No additional fees or charges for DoS and DDoS potected servers and infrastructure
• No fees for bot-generated and malicious traffic on all unmetered dedicated clouds and dedicated servers in Chicago
• No increased latency and long round-trip delays in application delivery in the event of a network attack
• All IPv4 and IPv6 settings are protected from DDoS attacks

Yes! Each Edge server hosted in the 2101 Roberts Drive data center has four (4x) 25-gigabit network interfaces configured for redundancy on 2 separate NIC cards. All four interfaces are placed into a single link access group (LAG) and utilize LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol ) for individual link monitoring. Your Edge Dedicated Server is connected to two network switches with two (2x) 25-gigabit connection links to the first switch and two (2x) 25-gigabit to the second switch. Each network switch has multiple 100-gigabit fiber connections to the data center's network architecture that feature failover protection. The overall networking architecture sustains full data transfer capacity with the failure of any single networking appliance or link. The data transfer from the Edge data centers to either the public Internet or the MPLS IP VPN network is secured by two diverse routers for each network. The routers are connected to a pair of network switches. The data transfer can be forwarded through both routers and will switch over automatically upon failure of any networking device.

Yes, you can achieve this using virtualization technology such as Proxmox VE. Proxmox provides a software stack called the HA Manager that automatically detects failures and provides automatic failover.

The Proxmox VE HA Manager acts as an "automated" administrator.After you configure resources (VMs, containers, etc.), the HA Manager monitors them for proper functionality and handles service failover to a redundant Chicago-based server in case of failure or downtime. The HA Manager can also handle normal user requests to start, stop, move, and migrate a service.

However, Proxmox VE is not the only option. Many other technologies use two or more physical servers to provide business continuity for IT infrastructure and hosted applications. Microsoft Windows Hyper-V allows server owners to create a high-availability cluster.

You can use your preferred cloud computing virtualization technology to create and deploy a dedicated cloud infrastructure on a single bare metal server or a cluster of servers. If you want to use two dedicated bare metal servers, they can be directly interconnected using 1GE, 10GE, 20GE or larger NIC cards. If you need HostColor's help to create a cloud computing architecture, we can help you design one, deploy it, and manage it as needed.
Edge bare-metal servers hosted at our Chicago's 2101 Roberts Drive data center can use the Ubuntu operating system with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) virtualization technology in Ubuntu 20 (or Ubuntu 22) OS..
All other HC dedicated servers in Chicago can run Proxmox VE, VMware ESXi, Linux Containers, VirtualBox, OpenVZ, Microsoft Hyper-V, Kubernetes, Docker, or other virtualization platforms.

Yes, you can create and host dedicated cloud infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes in Chicago data centers and use it to host containerized applications.

HostColor's Chicago bare metal and cloud infrastructure allows organizations to deploy run, scale up, scale down, and quickly move Docker containers and the containerized applications from one virtual containerized environment to another without interruption. Docker containers are executable software packages that contain everything needed to run an application, including code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings.

HC also enables enterprises to deploy a fully isolated, dedicated cloud infrastructure for hosting and orchestrating containerized applications, based on the Kubernetes open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services.

While most dedicated hosting providers offer "Unmanaged" or "Managed" hosting services, HostColor does "Semi-Managed" and "Managed" Dedicated Servers.
"Unmanaged" means that the client is solely responsible for the management of the bare-metal dedicated server they have. The provider's responsibility is to make sure that the server network connection works properly and in case of a hardware failure, to fix the failed components, or to replace the whole physical server.
"Managed" means that the provider is responsible for managing the network, the physical server, the installed operating system, and the software environment. The provider does operating system updates, software updates, and other management and configuration tasks on the physical server. In other words unmanaged dedicated servers do not feature server-side support and therefore the clients pay for the base infrastructure service. The 'Managed Dedicated Servers' feature full server-side infrastructure, OS, and software environment support and therefore are more expensive, as the provider's experts commit time and work hours to deliver technical and system administration.
HostColor fills the gap by offering "Semi-Managed" Dedicated Servers in Chicago. "Semi-Managed" means that our administrators install your preferred OS on the physical server or your preferred virtualization platform to transform the physical server into a Cloud infrastructure. We create a custom technology environment per your requirements and keep on record a description with the 'base desired state' of your server in Chicago. As a part of the "Semi-Managed" support contract, HostColor reinstalls the server OS per the request and helps the client fix issues and troubleshoot in case of any operating system, networking, or software configuration issues. All "Semi-Managed" Chicago dedicated servers feature up to 30 minutes per month of technical and system administration. Any time spent by HC experts on managing the server OS, software environments, or troubleshooting will be charged at HostColor's standard managed service rates.

All HostColor dedicated servers in Chicago come with "Free Infrastructure Support". HostColor never charges you for access to infrastructure technical support. Unlike the large hyperscale clouds like AWS, Azure and others, that charge their customers for access to technical support for their bare-metal or cloud infrastructure.
Our infrastructure technical support covers everything related to network interfaces and the core functionality of the physical components of your Chicago bare-metal dedicated server such as CPU, RAM, and storage drives. With our free infrastructure support, you can save money and have access to the technical support you need for the core components and network functions of your Chicago server.
Please note that the "Free Infrastructure Support" does not include support for the operating system (OS), any custom configurations created and maintained by the customer, and the installed software applications.
In addition to the "Free Infrastructure Support" HostColor takes the dedicated hosting services it provides to a new level of reliability with its "Semi-Managed Dedicated Servers" support.

The best way to get quality support is to login to your account and Open a Support Ticket. New customers, please use contacts us here). This allows us to track quality and response time and ensure that customer requests are answered promptly.

Live chat and phone support are also available. The support team also communicates with Managed Services customers via instant messaging on Telegram. However, all of these support channels are in addition to support ticket communication.