Companies are migrating their IT infrastructure into the cloud, and more businesses now opt to outsource the appropriate hardware resources and leverage more flexible rental models. On the other hand, specialized web hosts are now offering diverse models for businesses and private users alike – But the concept lying behind it is never as innovative.
Most of the time, web hosting platforms offer creative ideas that may sound excellent in theory, but practically, they can leave users even more confused. One marketing term that’s fast becoming more popular in this “cloudification” era is the bare metal server concept.
What Does a Bare Metal Server Mean?
The phrase “bare metal” is used on the web hosting product to suggest that it focuses on web hosting’s physical aspect – the hardware. Also called the single-tenant server, the bare metal server was initially known as a dedicated server. In principle, it refers to the computer in the data center of the hosting provider, which allows a single customer to access the resources.
The single-customer use distances the hosting solution from conventional shared hosting like virtual servers that host various schemes within distinct virtual machines but on a similar hardware basis.
Benefits of the Bare Metal Server
Here are some of the benefits you’ll enjoy when you migrate to the bare metal server:
- Performance – Hosting solution providers can optimize the resources within the single-tenant physical server to handle your unique workloads. As such, you can be sure that it will perform according to your needs.
- Reliability – The product helps you avoid the “noisy neighbor effect.” All the server resources are for you alone; hence you’ll avoid the inconvenience of sharing resources with fellow tenants in hypervisor servers.
- Security – You have control over the server. You can isolate your applications, data, and other resources using the bare metal server to attain a higher security and privacy level than what the virtual server offers.
- Utility-style billing – The hosting product helps you control your operation costs since you’ll only pay for the resources you utilize down to the minute. This is the ideal consumption-based billing and pricing.
- Root access – Bare metal servers differ widely from their multi-tenant counterparts since they came with root access. On the other hand, shared hosting doesn’t allow users to make adjustments within the shared hosting platform’s root directory. The bare metal server’s administration isn’t just limited to project folders. Instead, it offers unlimited options to grant you the freedom to install server configuration and software components.
- Dedicated hardware – Shared hosting platforms use virtual machines that are mostly independent of each other. But this hosting concepts presents the risks of vulnerability and non-responding scripts on the same device. Fortunately, bare metal servers eliminate the performance glitches.
Besides these benefits, you also need to know that these are Linux dedicated servers, and they can be used with Fedora, CentOS, and Debian distributions.
Application Areas for Bare Metal Servers
Nowadays, cloud services’ available computing alternatives aren’t just limited to the cloud and bare metal servers. Most cloud-native applications are now leveraging containers as the default infrastructure choice.
Platform-as-a-service is also the ideal solution for developers who don’t need to manage runtime environments or operating systems. Serverless computing, on the other hand, is fast becoming the preferred model for cloud purists.
However, when evaluating bare metal or dedicated servers, most users gravitate towards comparing it to virtual servers. It’s common to find companies combining bare metal servers with virtualized resources within the cloud environment.
Virtual servers offer faster provisioning times, a more significant resource density, and the freedom to scale up or down quickly based on your needs. But bare metal or dedicated servers can be ideal for several primary use cases that require the combination of capabilities centered around greater processing power, dedicated resources, and consistency in the network I/O and disk performance.
- Performance-centric app and data workloads – Since bare metal offers full right of entry and authority over hardware resources, it’s the ideal hosting solution for workloads such as big data, HPC, high-performance databases, and finance and gaming workloads.
- Applications with complex regulatory or security requirements – Thanks to the combination of physical resource separation and global data center footprint, the bare metal server can help companies adopt the cloud while meeting complex regulatory and security requirements.
- Large, steady workloads – The bare metal hosting product can also be an excellent fit for applications like CRM, SCM, or ERP, which portray a stable set of continuous resource demands.
Key Takeaway
From Rise Dedicated Servers to Storage Dedicated to Advanced Servers, there’s no limit to the immense benefits of adopting the bare metal server. All these come with their unique plans, and you only need to choose one that matches your budget and needs.
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