Thanks to the cloud, enterprise-computing environments can reap a myriad of rewards such as application scalability, reduced costs, and resource efficiencies. Unfortunately, businesses interested in capitalising on the cloud must identify and implement the right solution, which isn’t always as simple or straightforward as you’d imagine.
Generally speaking, though, you will have to choose between Bare Metal and Virtual Servers. Both have their unique advantages, but your decision will be largely dependent on how much you value performance, scalability, flexibility, security and cost.
Bare Metal
With a solution like 100TB Bare Metal Servers, you will benefit from a dedicated physical server that is yours and yours alone. This allows for:
- Better security and privacy – Businesses restricted by compliance measures can rest assured that nobody else will be able to access data on the server.
- Greater processing power – Since resources are not being shared, the hypervisor layer of a virtual server is not required, resulting in greater processing power.
- More consistent performance – With virtual servers, you could notice peaks and troughs in performance due to other user activity. But the resources of a bare metal server remain ever-present, as they are exclusively yours.
- Complete control – Make the most of your ability to control and isolate a server’s physical resources with a bare metal solution.
- No financial surprises – Bare metal solutions are billed on a monthly basis, which means you always know how much you need to pay, giving you no nasty surprises.
Virtual servers
Before you disregard the possibility of picking virtual servers over the performance and privacy plus points of bare metal, consider the following:
- Quick and easy scalability – If you require more space, additional virtual servers are available at a moment’s notice.
- The ultimate in flexibility – Just like household utilities that fluctuate throughout the course of a year, virtual servers allow organisations to scale up or scale down their server resources with the greatest of ease.
- Greater cost control – Virtual servers will only charge for the amount of resources used during your billing period, making it easier to control costs.
- Better server efficiency – Unlike bare metal, where resources could go underutilised or wasted, virtualisation enables better server efficiency.
- Affordable server solution – You won’t find a solution that provides scalability, flexibility, and efficiency cheaper than virtual servers.
Which one is right for you and your business?
Although every organisation’s server requirements are different, choosing between bare metal and virtual servers is relatively straightforward.
Bare metal servers are best suited to businesses that cannot afford any periods of prolonged website downtime. For this reason, it makes sense to go for a provider that also offers complete turnkey management and maintenance services.
On the other hand, businesses that can expect and predict traffic spikes, such as online retailers during the holiday season, should opt for virtual servers instead. However, be aware that incorrect budgeting of hosting resources can cause virtualisation costs to spiral out of control.