Dedicated Servers vs Bare Metal Cloud
We all know that Cloud hosting is getting more and more popular, but people still rely on the good old dedicated servers. Let’s compare them and see why this competition will stay for at least the next 10-20 years.
What is Bare Metal Cloud?
Speaking in simple words, a bare metal cloud is a cluster of dedicated servers stripped from hypervisors, which allows for delivering an exceptional performance without any overheads. You can call it server cluster 2.0 if you wish. You are still bound to use the software in order to orchestrate all this hardware but still, it is much more efficient than any public cloud out there.
Differences Between Bare Metal Cloud and Dedicated Servers
Let’s see what kind of features Bare Metal Cloud has and how it differs from the dedicated servers:
- Your own dedicated resources
The same as a regular dedicated server your resources are dedicated solely to you. You are in full control over your environment and can do whatever you wish with it. With a dedicated server, you are a little bit short on resources but that’s it about it.
- Free from any intrusions from your neighbors.
Since it is a single-tenant instance you are free from any other clients the hosting might have. The single-tenant means that even the switch that your cloud connected to is also may be leased exclusively to you. Meaning that even if DDoS attacks occur for example on VPS node of the hoster, you will not feel a thing.
- Scalability
Nothing beats cloud in terms of scalability. Bare metal provides you with the same level of scalability that any public cloud has. Dedicated servers fall short here though. They don’t have software on board to cope with such tasks in the same swift manner. Bummer.
- API Provisioning
By utilizing certain APIs you are able to see your infrastructure as a code. This allows creating scenarios for DevOps team to quickly provision certain VMs for specific tasks in a matter of minutes. For all those folks out there who know what is Ansible or Terraform this certainly rings a bell. This stuff is sure possible within Dedicated Servers but the work will be very tedious.
Dedicated Server Use Cases
In a lot of cases, you really don’t need this type of shenanigans like fast scalability. Sometimes the only thing you need is that your website is running great under heavy load and here is where dedicated servers step in to play. They are significantly cheaper than any bare metal cloud, thus offering almost the same advantages that any bare-metal cloud has to offer like dedicated resources, performance, and single-tenancy. Simply because the bare-metal cloud is at least 4-5 dedicated servers connected together by software like VMware. Bare metal cloud is a step forward after regular dedicated servers, we won’t lie here, but still, there are a lot of use cases here.
E-commerce website
Whether you use WooCommerce, Opencart, Shopify, Magento, or any other e-commerce CMS out there you need a steady foundation for your business. Dedicated server is a perfect choice when you monitor the customers’ activity and see that it will spike up thanks to the marketing campaign you have launched on the web for example. VPS might not do justice here, you need something bigger that can withstand such a load. Nothing disappoints businesses more than a crashed website, that’s why it is better to order something that has a certain threshold.
Application development
First of all, dedicated servers offer stellar performance compared to any other types of hosting out there, like shared hosting or virtual private server. Unprecedented data protection allows the software to be developed under strict security rules because your server will not be affected by any other users and it is very difficult to softly hack it without any hard intrusions like DDoS attacks. It is a very vital part in any kind of development. Imagine you are developing a HIPPA-compliant app and you have a few gigabytes of sensitive data of patients and a pesky hacker steals the data. The damage to reputation will be unreal. Many dedicated servers also come with encryption options and data backup services that can provide an added layer of security.
Render farms
If you are an Animation studio or Game studio or your business is somehow closely related to 3dsMax, Maya, or Blender, then you really should start thinking about your own render farm. It simply will make your rendering faster. Because usually when there is a team of 3D modelers sending constant tasks to process certain models it needs to be offloaded and processed by someone and not just one machine. Of course, we are not talking about small tasks but about something time-consuming like frame rendering or animation rendering that could take 12-24 hours to render in the best-case scenarios. Don’t forget that if you do it on your regular PC and then your office will be struck by blackout all the progress will be lost. That’s why it is strongly advisable to place render farms in the data center with a constant supply of electricity and internet.
Big data processing
So what kind of Dedicated server can be called suitable for Big Data? We could state that it is a server with high processing power and fast storage. It should have the capabilities of parallel computation in order to process the information faster and also possess an option to be HA/DR - High Availability/Disaster Recovery. Most of the dedicated servers for Big Data should use NoSQL or NewSQL systems like MongoDB, VoltDB, ClustrixDB, or Redis.
Conclusion
As you can see there are a variety of use cases here. Before choosing the Dedicated Server of Bare Metal Cloud you need to understand what kind of objectives you are going to achieve. Ordering a Bare Metal Cloud for a small e-commerce website selling socks with an audience of over 30k a month is an overkill, but it is a good fit for a dedicated server with a 1 or 10 Gbit port. It is quite difficult to say that in your case you should go with this or that without knowing what kind of business you are running or what kind of pages you are serving to your customer. Make sure to contact our team to learn what kind of solution will suit your needs. We’re available via Livechat 24/7/365. See ya!