Do you feel your business would improve from having dedicated resources available on demand?

If your critical workloads need full processing capacity that you don’t usually achieve with virtualization, consider using a bare metal cloud server. But before we get to that, let’s start at the beginning.

To understand the differences between all the server hosting options available to you, first, you need to understand what is possible. Below are two definitions of the most basic types of server environments:

What is a Dedicated Server?

A dedicated server is a physical storage device capable of storing operating systems (OS), hypervisor layers, and virtual servers. It’s tangible and acts as the hardware component in housing the above software constructs needed to run programs or devices called “clients.” Since they are physical technology, companies need to store them on site.

In addition to inherent storage costs, dedicated servers are the most expensive server hosting option for business. However, dedicated servers’ high cost reflects its power. Companies that steadily demand high server capacity use dedicated servers for their unparalleled performance.

Lastly, these types of servers are single-tenant environments, meaning only one client can access the hardware. Privacy needs, price, and storage space are considerations one must take into account before deciding if dedicated servers are for them.

What is a Virtual Server?

A virtual server, also known as a virtual machine, is a software-defined server that runs on top of a physical machine, such as a dedicated server.

This definition means virtual servers still require physical machines to run on. However, it allows for multi-tenant environments. You still get single-tenant access to your virtual resources but hardware resources are divided among many virtual machines.

The main benefits of virtual machines are its low-cost and flexibility. Furthermore, virtual server resources can often be rented on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning you pay for what you use.

Electing to rent a virtual server has become popular among businesses that don’t require the best performance or highest capacity servers, as virtual servers are more affordable and offer better value through varying levels of performance configurations. For businesses with variable workloads, renting cloud servers allow them to scale according to their needs.

Now that you have a fundamental understanding of dedicated and virtual servers, it will be easier to discern more advanced variations of these services, such as bare metal servers, infrastructure-as-a-service, and bare metal cloud.

What is a Bare Metal Server?

Dedicated servers and bare metal servers are very similar. Both of these servers are single-tenant machines that give users complete access to the underlying hardware. This access is possible because they do not use a hypervisor layer to create separate virtual machines (VM) on the server. Instead, the server eliminates the need for layers by installing the operating system directly on the server. The result is some of the best performance on the market.

These servers also allow for the configuration of its processor, storage, and memory, which isn’t shared. On VMs, this is not the case, as the providers control the hardware. With both of these server types, users needn’t worry about their performance suffering, as their hardware is used to power their web hosting or applications solely.

On the contrary, the difference between a dedicated and bare metal server comes down to the quality of the hardware components and the flexibility of contracts.

Bare metal servers provide configurations with top-of-the-line hardware products such as newest generation processors, best-in-class random access memory (RAM), and NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) with lightning-fast load times. Whereas, dedicated servers do not.

In terms of contracts, bare metal servers also offer more flexibility in billing. Use them for a dramatically shorter time-period than dedicated servers, where you only pay for what you use. You can even run a bare metal server on a per-hour billing model.

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