It’s critical to understand that each type of cloud infrastructure has its own purpose. Dedicated servers possess their own unique set of characteristics that make the perfect choice for certain applications but terrible for others.
You’ll find a ton of information online that talk about why you should use dedicated servers over cloud servers. Unfortunately, most of them are fluff. Many of the points they mention could be applied to either solution as long as you configure the infrastructure properly. In this resource from Intergrid you’ll learn when to use dedicated servers and the many benefits they bring to your application.
Table of Contents
When to Use Dedicated Servers?
When Predictable Performance is a Must
Virtual Private Servers can be somewhat reliable, but you’re still vulnerable to the noisy neighbor effect.
Keep in mind that VPS are created in the cloud and they’re used by multiple users or applications at a time. Since plenty of users or applications are using the same resources, then tend to compete for the available bandwidth, I/O, CPU, etc. It’s not uncommon to see one application become too greedy and negatively impact the other applications running on the same server, thus compromising their performance.
Theoretically, such a problem can be avoided by setting the number of virtual machines running on the host, thereby minimizing the impact of noisy neighbors and ensuring that enough resources are available for peaks in demand. In reality, however, it’s nearly impossible to provide this level of protection in shared environments.
Meanwhile, a dedicated server is immune to this noisy neighbor effect because 100% of the resources are dedicated to you and nobody else.
All set to deploy on bare metal? Create a free account and configure your bare metal servers here.
It’s possible that you squeeze out the last bit of resources from your dedicated server, resulting in a less than stellar performance. The good news is that you can easily pinpoint the cause and the solution since you’re the only one using the dedicated server.
When You’re I/O Intensive
Any business that requires tons of storage would benefit from a highly-optimized server environment for IOPS. For example, high I/O throughput is necessary in analytics, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.
Dedicate servers grant exclusive access to sever resources, local storage, and interconnects, which means maximizing IOPs for your unique application.
You can rest assured that you’ll have predictable and reliable access to IOPs because of the absence of noisy neighbors.
When You Need Total Control
The use of virtualized resources entail the hypervisor sitting between you and the host machine. This means your extent of control is drastically limited.
When using a dedicated server, on the other hand, you can administrator level access to the bare metal server itself. In other words, you have total control over installing your preference of OS and making any configuration you wish.
You even have the option of installing your own hypervisor and create virtual machines without any limitations in mind.
When Always On is Your Only Choice
Virtualization has introduced revolutionary changes in the way IT infrastructure is costed out. It’s now common to see providers offering utility or on-demand pricing. For example, popular cloud service providers such as AWS and Azure are able to offer a wide range of different plans as they can, among other things, bill bandwidth and CPU cycles separately.
These new pricing schemes, however, usually favor only those who see major demand fluctuations. If you find yourself having to be always on, then dedicated servers continue to be the most cost-effective option for you.
