How to Choose the Best Server Type for Your Infrastructure Needs?

Servers are an essential component of any modern IT infrastructure, and choosing the right type of server can make all the difference to the success of your project. There are several different server types available, each offering varying speeds, performance, versatility, and monthly upkeep costs. In this article, we will explore the various server types to help you make an informed decision.

Managed vs. Unmanaged Servers

The first thing to consider is whether you want a managed or unmanaged server. With a managed server, the provider manages and maintains the server for you, including installing the operating system, keeping software up to date, monitoring performance, and making security updates. This option provides more time to focus on your core business, but it is often more expensive. With an unmanaged server, the provider only supplies the physical server and network connectivity, leaving the maintenance and management of the server up to you.

Dedicated Servers

A dedicated server is a physical machine with a processor, hard drive, RAM, and operating system. As the name implies, a dedicated server is devoted to a single individual, organization, or application. Dedicated servers are excellent for applications with predictive workloads, and they are a good step up from shared hosting in terms of performance and security. They are suitable for handling sensitive data and almost always run faster than shared servers and virtualized servers.

Virtualized Servers

A virtualized server, often known as a virtual private server (VPS), is a software construct running on a dedicated server. Using what’s known as a hypervisor, virtualized servers emulate typical compute resources like the processor, RAM, disk, and network. Virtualized servers can be more economical than dedicated servers, as multiple customers can share the physical hardware. This option gives you a dedicated slice of the compute resources, and the actions of other users on the server won’t ever affect the performance you get.

Cloud Servers

Cloud servers are another type of virtualized server but on a grander scale. You still get a virtualized slice of resources, but this time you’re getting a slice of one or more servers situated in massive data centers. The most significant benefit of a cloud server solution is its incredible scalability. You can scale back your provision of services when you don’t need them, and it’s also straightforward to scale up your provision when you expect more traffic or need the extra processing power to perform big data analytics at speed. Cloud servers also offer outstanding redundancy, with your application typically copied across several servers in different data centers.

Bare-Metal Cloud

A bare-metal cloud is a mix of cloud services and dedicated servers. You rent a solution from the cloud provider as usual, but you don’t share any hardware resources with other tenants at all. So, no other virtual machines are running on the same hardware. Bare-metal cloud arguably offers more flexibility, security, and control than traditional cloud servers. Yet it also provides better scalability and redundancy than dedicated servers, making it the best of both worlds if money is no object.

Conclusion

Choosing the correct type of server makes all the difference to the success of your project. Shared servers are economical but are relatively slow and are prone to drops in performance if the server is oversubscribed. Dedicated servers offer high performance but increased management costs. Virtualized servers offer many of the advantages of dedicated servers at a lower cost. Cloud servers provide outstanding scalability at the expense of a more complex initial setup. Bare-metal cloud servers offer the high performance of dedicated servers with the scalability of cloud servers. Consider your application's requirements before choosing the right server type for your infrastructure needs.