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Bare Metal vs Cloud Compute

How dedicated physical servers compare to virtual cloud instances, and how to pick the right one for your workload.

Bare metal servers and cloud compute servers both solve the problem of hosting. Bare metal servers are physical servers, running 'bare metal' without a hypervisor in between. This means 100% of the cores, memory and disk space is reserved for a single tenant. Cloud compute servers on the other hand are virtualized, using the physical servers to host multiple virtual servers. These servers can be created, resized or deleted as needed. They only incur costs for the servers that are actually in use. At Netrouting we offer both types of servers, and can align the solution to your needs. That means you can choose the best solution for the job at hand, rather than having to work around the limitations of a single type of server.

For projects that require consistent and high quality performance, full hardware control and single tenant isolation then bare metal is the best choice for your projects. For projects where being able to very quickly spin up and down instances as required and scaling up and down within the constraints of the individual bare metal machines is more suitable then cloud compute is best.

Side by side

Bare metal and cloud compute compared

Comparison of bare metal servers and cloud compute on the criteria that usually decide the choice.
Criteria	Bare metal server	Cloud compute
Architecture	Single physical machine, no hypervisor	Virtual machines on a shared physical host
Tenancy	Single tenant, dedicated hardware	Multi-tenant, shared underlying hardware
Performance	Consistent, full hardware to one workload	Good, can vary with shared host load
Isolation	Strong, nothing shared with others	Logical isolation between instances
Scaling	Add or change servers; not instant	Create, resize and remove instances on demand
Provisioning speed	Slower, a physical machine is assigned	Fast, instances spin up in minutes
Billing model	Per server, predictable monthly cost	By usage, pay for what you run
Best for	Steady, high-throughput, isolated workloads	Elastic, variable or short-lived workloads

When to choose what

Which one fits your workload

Choose bare metal when

Workloads that run for a long time and are very active such as a tool or application that runs for a month on a database or storage node and can consume all IOPS from a single tenant.
Licensing based on physical cores or even physical sockets.
Compliance reasons to run a single tenant on a piece of hardware.
High latency workloads that are sensitive to "noisy neighbor" that could have adverse effects for another tenant.

Choose cloud compute when

Workload can vary from day to day and from week to week.
I have three environments: development, staging and test.
There are some growing projects that are starting small and then increasing in capacity as the projects grow.
We currently run as pay-as-you-go by the hour for the compute rather than having to pay up-front for a server.

Not sure which platform fits?

Tell us about your workload and we will help you choose between bare metal and cloud compute, or run a mix of both.

Contact our team

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200+ teams rely on Netrouting for bare metal, cloud, GPU servers and colocation. Easy to order servers within minutes. We also love to design custom servers for you and your business, with our experienced engineers.