Bare-Metal Servers

Bare-metal servers are physical servers dedicated to a single tenant. Unlike shared hosting or virtualized servers, bare-metal servers provide exclusive access and control to the user, allowing full utilization of the server's processing power, memory, and storage.

Bare-metal servers are often used for high-performance computing, machine learning, and big data analytics workloads that require a lot of resources and consistent performance. They are common in industries with strict compliance requirements as the exclusive access reduces potential security risks.

They eliminate the "noisy neighbor" issue prevalent in shared servers where other users' activities can impact performance. Also, they offer consistent performance as there is no hypervisor layer, which in other server types manages the creation, running, and management of virtual machines.

For optimal performance, see our minimum recommended hardware specifications.

The overhead of managing a bare-metal server can be arduous, and the majority of our clients choose to use cloud-managed servers for this reason. If you do choose to manage a bare-metal server, make sure to complete the steps in the self-hosted introduction before proceeding, and install a recommended Linux distribution.