You have to hand it to cloud vendors — they have incredible marketing. If you are new to infrastructure hosting, you might be forgiven for thinking that the cloud is the only option, that anything else is just so last century.
In reality, dedicated servers remain the go-to infrastructure platform for many experienced engineers. Why? Because dedicated servers are cost effective, offer unbeatable performance, and, most importantly, control.
A dedicated server is just what it sounds like: a powerful computer with on-board processors, RAM, and storage, located in a data center that provides power, cooling, and redundant connections to the Internet.
Cloud platforms use virtual servers, on top of which they layer a hypervisor, guest operating systems, and the user’s software. Dedicated servers are sometimes called bare metal servers because your operating system and software run as close to the physical hardware — the bare metal — as possible.
There are good reasons for a virtualization layer: if you want to deploy dozens of servers in seconds, you want a cloud platform. But that’s not what most server hosting customers need.
- Cost Effective
Dedicated servers have a reputation for being expensive which isn’t entirely undeserved. On average, a dedicated server costs more than a cloud server, and the cheapest cloud servers are less expensive than the cheapest dedicated servers. But if you compare the price-to-power ratio, dedicated servers come out way ahead. A cloud server with equivalent resources to a particular dedicated server is almost certainly more expensive.
Dedicated servers provide the most bang for the buck.
- Performance
Because dedicated server software runs close to the bare metal, there’s no virtualization overhead. Every resource is applied to your workload. Additionally, dedicated servers scale further vertically than cloud servers — if you need a really powerful server, go dedicated because you’ll pay less while benefiting from a more powerful machine.
- Privacy and Security
Public clouds are multi-tenant hosting environments: many organizations use the same underlying hardware. Now, while that’s not necessarily a problem, cloud users have no insight into the underlying network, virtualization layer, and hosting environment. They simply don’t know how seriously the platform takes security or privacy.
- Control
Most importantly, bare metal dedicated servers provide complete control: it’s your server and you can do whatever you want with it. Managing the server is your responsibility. It’s up to you to keep it secure. But if you know what you’re doing, that’s by far the best scenario. I can’t tell you how often I’ve commiserated with experienced system administrators as they wait for their cloud vendor to fix something that they could fix in minutes if only they had access and control.
For experienced server admins, it doesn’t get much better than an enterprise-grade dedicated server.
Also read: 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2018 that will define the cloud industry for good
About Guest Author-
Chris Schwarz is the CEO of Cyber Wurx, a premium colocation services provider with a world-class Data Center in Atlanta, Georgia that also specializes in Dedicated Server Hosting and VPS Hosting. Check out their hosting blog at https://cyberwurx.com/blog/.
thanks for sharing great info it will be really helpful for me.