Dedicated Hosting is a form of web hosting where a client chooses to lease an entire server housed in an off-site data centre that is dedicated to their uses only, and not sharing it with anyone else as in a shared hosting environment. This contrast to  Managed Hosting, where the customer needs to have the capability to perform all system administration and management activities on the server from their remote desktop.

Dedicated Hosting offers the customer their own private server thus offering  complete control over its use. Most web hosting packages are called shared hosting providers - not dedicated hosting providers. What this means is that the server or servers that host your website are simultaneously hosting numerous other websites also. This gives you a discounted rate on web hosting services in exchange for tolerating certain technical constraints, like bandwidth, disk space, upload and download speeds, security and privacy, traffic, and probably the most notable restriction -- total control.

The key factors that a customer needs to  should consider are:

Business is cost conscious and the opportunity to cut costs wherever possible, is high on the mind of the CFO and the CIO.  Indeed coemptive pressure are such that  saving money may well be a matter of survival. IT functions based on in-house infrastructure are high on the list of areas that are being  outsourced. This applies across the scale from single applications to entire data centres.

There are differences between Linux and the Microsoft platform (and others). There are some differences between two platforms, such as security features, functionality and of course supported scripting languages. Microsoft has its own operating system with associated licensing fees, and Linux is an open source operating system that is often free. The majority of web features run on both platforms.