There are numerous differences between the colocation hosting services and dedicated hosting services. The basic difference is that a colocation service consist of locating your servers or IT infrastructure to the the third party data center, whereas dedicated servers are already with the data centers which is being leased or purchased by the client.

Dedicated server hosting is one of the most popular and most demanded form of web hosting. People are more skeptical about the colocation services. Dedicated is mostly chosen by customers that have good level of data and possess high traffic within the websites. Basically, Colocation services add some hardware from the customer as well as hardware is scheduled within a data center which is made available from the Colocation service agency.

There is one difference which can be said as ownership difference, in dedicated web server the ownership or the control is with the client and he gets the unshared access, that is monitor by the hosting provider and collocated server is owned by the user and placed the server hardware in house of data center in rental space along with the servers of some other companies and individuals.

In colocation servers basically the user purchases his own hardware and softwares licenses and place them in a data center. In this type of hosting, customers have the flexibility to manage, secure and maintain their servers while the data center provides the server space, security, redundancy, controlled air temperature, UPS and managed server solutions. Managed dedicated servers remove the burden of technical maintenance to a company by providing system administration within the service.

Dedicated servers are generally managed and upgraded by the hosting providers itself, but in colocation servers you can not expect to upgrade your servers by the hosting provider, they will just physically secure your servers in their infrastructure. As far as the costing is concerned the dedicated servers are not a costlier affair as compared to the colocation web servers as in dedicated servers you get fully managed services by the clients and in colocation servers you only get the physical security.

A dedicated server hosting services provides complete freedom to the users as they can install any software and can have full root access to the server,whereas in colocation hosting the client has to rely on the hosting providers for the amendments.

In a way we can say that both the hosting services are appropriate at their places, it all depends on the requirements and the applications which a user want to opt for.

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system. It is one of the freely available operating systems offered by Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The core focus of OpenBSD dedicated server is on security essentials which distinguishes it from others. The important factor for OpenBSD dedicated server is to proactively search for security holes. Researchers comb through the system files one at a time in search of possible weaknesses in the code. The main website for OpenBSD clearly states the goal for this distro is proactive security and integrated cryptography, which are both important for OpenBSD dedicated servers.

The oldest most popular BSD- based operating systems are still active today with Free BSD being the additional one. The features mainly the security features which are not available or present in other operating systems are included specifically in OpenBSD dedicated server and has a tradition of developers auditing the source code for software bugs and security problems. The project maintains strict policies on licensing and prefers the open source BSD licence and its variants—in the past this has led to a comprehensive licence audit and moves to remove or replace code under licences found less acceptable.

The steps to install OpenBSD on dedicated server is simple and easy to follow which will be explained further. Following is the process of installing OpenBSD on a dedicated server . In this we assume that you are already connected to the console shell and rebooted the server. When the boot prompt comes up, type ‘openbsd’ to start OpenBSD’s network boot loader, then ’/bsd.rd’ to start the installation.

boot: openbsd
>> OpenBSD/i386 PXEBOOT 2.03
boot> /bsd.rd
booting tftp:/bsd.rd: 5197108+918896 [52+205088+189820]=0x635ae8
entry point at 0x200120

Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1995-2009 OpenBSD. All rights reserved.  http://www.OpenBSD.org

OpenBSD 4.5 (RAMDISK_CD) #1112: Sat Feb 28 15:06:26 MST 2009
    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/RAMDISK_CD
cpu0: AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3200+ ("AuthenticAMD" 686-class, 128KB L2 cache) 1.81 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,CX16
real mem  = 1056468992 (1007MB)
avail mem = 1014886400 (967MB)
mainbus0 at root
 ... etc.
 root on rd0a swap on rd0b dump on rd0b
erase ^?, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C, status ^T
(I)nstall, (U)pgrade or (S)hell?

Lastly you can press I to start the installation after reaching the above point. In this way your OpenBSD is installed on the dedicated server host.