Bare Metal Cloud vs. Dedicated Servers

Server provisioning

Even though dedicated servers support particle orchestration, provisioning and deploying them is a manual process. Datacenter technicians configure and customize dedicated servers by hand according to the customer’s hardware specifications.

Bare Metal Cloud servers are grouped into pre-configured server instance types that users can provision and deploy automatically without human intervention.

Provisioning time

Depending on the complexity of the deployment, it takes anywhere from hours and days to weeks or even months to provision dedicated servers.

Thanks to automation, provisioning one or more Bare Metal Cloud instances takes less than 120 seconds while the process of decommissioning is instantaneous.

Pre-installed virtualization layer

Bare Metal Cloud and dedicated servers do not come with pre-installed hypervisors or other virtualization layers. However, users can add their desired hypervisor or container engine.

In the absence of virtualization, both server types allow users to utilize the full performance potential of physical CPU, RAM, and storage resources. And with root-level administrative access, users have more freedom to optimize and customize their environments to support specific workloads.

Hardware customization

Bare Metal Cloud servers offer limited customization options in terms of hardware, but users can choose between 20 different pre-configured instance types.

Dedicated servers are highly customizable and can be provisioned with specific hardware components based on the customer’s specific requirements.

Dedicated resources

There is no resource sharing among multiple users on the same machine in Bare Metal Cloud or dedicated server environments. All of the server’s physical compute, memory, and storage resources are dedicated exclusively to one customer.

Billing

Bare Metal Cloud servers are billed hourly on a pay-per-use basis. Customers can deploy a server instance for a couple of hours or days and only pay for the resources consumed. However, customers that need guaranteed resources availably can take advantage of Reservations. This monthly billing option is ideal for those who want to reserve Bare Metal Cloud resources for a longer period.

Dedicated servers most often entail monthly or yearly billing plans and providers usually require customers to sign long-term contracts. In general, providers do not offer hourly billing plans for dedicated servers.

Latest hardware

As a rule of thumb, Bare Metal Cloud servers are fitted with the latest CPU, RAM, and storage components. On the other hand, dedicated servers are often associated with low-end or outdated hardware, but that’s not always the case.

phoenixNAP’s FlexServers are dedicated servers powered by next-gen scalable CPU technologies from Intel, hardware components from Supermicro, and cutting-edge NVMe drives.

Continuous Delivery Alignment

As an automation-ready platform, Bare Metal Cloud is tailor-fit for powering build and testing servers in CI/CD pipelines. With root-level access to the hardware, teams have more control to fine-tune their environments for performance, giving them more compute power per dollar. Users can also leverage custom-built API and CLI utilities, as well as various Infrastructure as Code engines to manage resources programmatically. Bare Metal Cloud is fully compatible with Terraform, Ansible, and Pulumi with more IaC modules coming soon.

Dedicated servers are not automation-ready, do not support custom APIs and CLIs, and are not compatible with Infrastructure as Code engines by design.