What is Dedicated Server?
Also known as: Bare Metal
A dedicated server is a physical machine leased exclusively to one customer, offering full hardware control and no virtualization overhead for high-performance workloads.
A dedicated server, also called bare metal, is a physical computer in a data center that a hosting provider leases to a single customer. Unlike virtual private servers or shared hosting, no hypervisor or virtualization layer divides the hardware. The tenant has unrestricted access to the CPU, RAM, storage, and network interfaces for the full lease period.
Dedicated servers are provisioned from rack-mountable hardware with redundant power supplies and out-of-band management interfaces such as IPMI or iLO. The customer typically installs their own operating system, hypervisor, or container runtime. The provider handles physical security, network connectivity, and hardware maintenance. Common configurations include Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC processors, with RAM ranging from 64 GB to multiple terabytes.
This model delivers consistent performance because the server does not share resources with other tenants. It is used for latency-sensitive applications, database workloads, compliance-sensitive deployments, and hosting platforms that require kernel-level modifications. The cost is higher than virtualized or cloud alternatives, and scale-up requires purchasing new hardware. Dedicated servers occupy the base layer of the IaaS stack, below virtualization and container orchestration.
Key facts
- No hypervisor or resource sharing between tenants.
- Customer controls BIOS settings, kernel, and entire OS stack.
- Typically provisioned via IPMI, iLO, or iDRAC for remote management.
- Commonly used for high-traffic web hosting, databases, and game servers.
- Scaling requires manual hardware replacement or adding new units.
How it works in practice
Related terms
References
More in Hosting Types
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Bare-metal cloud is a service model that provisions dedicated physical servers on demand via API, giving users direct access to hardware without a hypervisor.
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Colocation
Colocation is a service where a provider rents physical space, power, cooling, and network connectivity in a data centre for customer-owned servers and hardware.
Hypervisor
A hypervisor is a software layer that creates and runs virtual machines by abstracting and isolating physical hardware resources for multiple operating systems.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is a service where the provider handles server administration, including OS maintenance, security updates, backups, and application support, allowing clients to focus on their core business.
Overselling
Overselling is a hosting practice where providers allocate more resources (bandwidth, disk, CPU) than physically available, assuming customers won't all use their maximum simultaneously.
Reseller Hosting
A business model where one entity purchases web hosting capacity wholesale from a provider and resells it to end customers under its own brand.