Module 67: Hosting Technologies
Dedicated and bare-metal servers
🏠The everyday picture
Owning a whole building: no neighbours, every room yours, the strongest walls you want, but you pay for all of it and the plumber is your problem.
📘What it really is
- A dedicated (or bare-metal) server is a whole physical machine rented for you alone.
- Advantages:
- all the hardware's power, with no "noisy neighbours" sharing it;
- can be cheaper than equivalent cloud resources for steady, heavy workloads;
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physical isolation for strict security or compliance needs.
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Disadvantages:
- slower to get (hours or days) and to resize;
- hardware failures need the provider to replace parts; you need a plan for downtime (backups, a second server);
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all the administration of a VPS, and more.
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Colocation means putting your own hardware in a provider's data centre: rare for small teams.
- Most new applications don't need dedicated servers. They appear in large, steady workloads (databases with huge data, video processing) or special requirements.
🖱️Try it
Look up a dedicated server offering and compare its monthly price with a cloud VPS of similar CPU and RAM. Write two situations where you'd choose dedicated, and why it's not right for your CRM.
✅Quick check
Name one advantage and one disadvantage of a dedicated server.
Show the answer
Advantage: all the power, no neighbours, good value for steady heavy loads. Disadvantage: slow to change, hardware failures are your problem, full administration.
Does a small CRM need a dedicated server?
Show the answer
Almost never; a small VPS or managed platform is enough.