The Practical Advantages of a Bare Metal Server
In an age where information and connectivity are everything, the server hosting needs of businesses have dramatically increased. From small startups to the largest enterprises, reliable hosting can create opportunities and improve operational workflow.
As you consider solutions for your organization, you’ll need to choose between dedicated access to a bare metal server or shared hosting through a virtual private server. Understanding the advantages of a bare metal server can help you to make the right decision.
What is a Bare Metal Server?
Shared web hosting through a virtual private server (VPS) is affordable and efficient but comes with major limitations. A bare metal server, also known as a single-tenant physical server, is an alternative suited to businesses that demand improved performance, versatility, and customization.
With a bare metal server, you lease the physical hardware and won’t share resources with other customers provisioned on the same equipment. Your organization will have root-level access to the server, offering complete customization as if the server were located on your premises.
Full control with no compromises leads many businesses to choose bare metal servers over shared alternatives.
The Advantages of Choosing a Bare Metal Server
There are several key advantages to choosing a bare metal server. Even just a few of these could provide enough relevance to your organization to make the switch.
Improved Security
Virtual private servers can offer impressive security that is sufficient for many organizations. However, if you seek the best enterprise-grade security, especially for compliance reasons, a bare metal server is the ideal solution.
With dedicated access to the server, your data will be physically isolated from other users within the data center. It becomes much harder for an attacker to breach the system and access private information. Firewall rules and other security systems can be customized to your requirements, with none of the limitations that would be imposed by a virtual private server.
Better Performance
Besides security, performance is the most important consideration to make when choosing a server solution. On a virtual private server, resources are shared between users. The resources in a virtualized environment aren’t dedicated, they are allocated. This means that your processes share access to the CPU, memory, storage controllers, and other key components, which can create bottlenecks and inconsistent performance depending on the load of the server and the types of users that you share it with.
On a bare metal server, all of the physical resources are yours to utilize, which significantly improves performance no matter how you use the server.
Superior Versatility
Virtual private servers are designed to cater to a broad range of customers. There will always be compromises when it comes to versatility.
A bare metal server gives full root access to the server, so there are no compromises when it comes to the software on the server. You get a blank canvas to extract the maximum potential of the hardware. You can choose the operating system, the database software, the control panels, and any of the software that you want to run.
And, you can even configure your own virtualized environment with a hypervisor for your users.
The Best Reliability
Having access to your own leased hardware creates better reliability. Being physically isolated, there are no load spikes triggered by other users on the server. Uptime is higher when compared to a shared solution.
The Use Cases That Benefit Most from a Bare Metal Server
Whether or not a bare metal server suits your organization depends largely on how you intend to use it. If the increased security, performance, and versatility make sense for your business, then the decision will be easy. You can also consider some of the most common use cases to consider how bare metal could fit into your strategy.
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- Game Server Hosting – Large multiplayer games can require incoming connections for hundreds or even thousands of users at a time. Compute demand on the CPU and memory utilization are often high. Virtualized environments on shared hardware can struggle to keep up with the demands of game server hosting. Bare metal is the best solution for performance and reliability.
- High-Performance Computing – Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other forms of high-performance computing require dedicated hardware with a high level of customization at the root and in the software. Bare metal provides the customization and performance needed in these scenarios.
- Data Analytics – Storing, processing, and generating insights from your datasets requires high compute power and the options with shared servers can be limited. Access to dedicated private hardware allows organizations to access the full potential of the hardware and perform analytics faster and more efficiently.
- Web Hosting – Although web hosting can work well on a shared service, the biggest and most demanding websites will perform better on bare metal. The level of customization, increased resource allocation, and improved security make more sense for larger websites and web applications. Improved security through isolation is also key to this use case.
It’s fair to state that a bare metal server will improve performance and versatility in every scenario. The key to your decision is evaluating whether the performance and security improvements are worth it for your organization. In many cases, the answer will be yes.
You can get affordable bare metal server solutions with instant delivery on pre-configured hardware. HostRound offers the most cost-competitive and reliable server solutions for your business.