Are Dedicated Servers Still Relevant? We Give 6 Reasons

The 6 benefits of dedicated servers for your IT infrastructure

Dedicated servers might be a good choice to host your IT applications. Let’s elaborate on its advantages and share 6 of the main benefits for selecting this type of solution for your IT infrastructure. 

1. Dedicated servers can support your IT infrastructure’s growth perspective

Cloud services often advertise scalability. It’s true that cloud hosting gives you instant scalability while in times of growth it doesn’t ask for any additional hardware to setup in the data center. Actually, public cloud doesn’t require deployment of hardware at all, as this is all taken care of by the cloud provider, but dedicated servers provide the ability to scale as well. The question is, what kind of scalability do you actually need for your IT infrastructure?

If you’re not a startup with anticipated unforeseen Internet traffic demand and accompanying growth in workloads, and if your IT environment doesn’t expand that often and certainly not instantly, it may be enough to just add new dedicated servers when growth for your IT infrastructure is expected and server space needs to be expanded. Then again, even with virtually instantaneous growth requirements you might opt for dedicated servers, as servers nowadays tend to come with short deployment lead times. Next to that, Worldstream through its Worldstream Elastic Network offers the opportunity to install dedicated servers ‘as-a-service.’ These bare metal servers as we call them do come with cloud-like and true instant deployment characteristics.

Most of the time, different servers also fulfill a specialized role in the overall IT infrastructure setup. Think of a file server, a database server or a web server. Or a server on which an ERP or CRM system for your organization may run. So, having multiple physical servers hosting your evolving and growing IT infrastructure as a whole is an approach that’s widely used on a global basis. 

2. Dedicated servers can bolster the stability and performance of your applications 

Since dedicated servers are only used by a single user, no other users can cause failures or downtime which enhances the stability and performance of your applications. You are not sharing the hardware, so there is no risk of any malicious activities on the same server interfering with the security of this hosting environment. The processing power and memory are exclusively yours. For many security-conscious organizations, exclusive server space is a determining factor. Dedicated servers can thus be a good choice for (web) applications that require above average security and/or tailormade security options.

When it comes to online presence and web facing applications, it is also considered that dedicated servers are beneficial in the field of search engine optimization. Since a dedicated server has its own IP address and no other users are hosted on the same server, a signal of higher quality is being sent to the search engines. Depending on the type of server, the raw power of a dedicated server also adds to the performance of applications and online reach.

To further enhance and safeguard the stability and performance of certain applications, different projects can be hosted on separate dedicated servers. 

To bolster performance of your IT infrastructure and seamlessly spread workloads across different locations, Worldstream through its Worldstream Elastic Network also has a cluster-as-a-service offering. This powerful IT solution allows to effortlessly build and manage your own virtualization cluster, with the hypervisor of your choice. The hypervisor software even enables all data center resources in geographically dispersed infrastructures, including hardware and cloud, to function as one. 

3. Dedicated servers may help take your IT security to the highest level 

One of the most important advantages of a dedicated server include its plethora of security capabilities and the options you have to optimize the security levels for your IT applications -end-to-end and fully tailored. A dedicated server actually gives you complete control over the security of your IT infrastructure including mitigating access control attacks for your hosting environment. Since you don’t share the space with anyone else, there’s no potential security risk from poorly built software of others on the dedicated server while the risk of threats and malicious attacks can effectively be reduced as well. 

With an unmanaged server, as a user, at least you would have to install security updates and patches to repair vulnerabilities in server software that could jeopardize the protection of the IT applications deployed on your dedicated servers. Updating and patching thus is a minimum requirement for the security of your unmanaged server. The regular scheduling of data backups for your server environment would also be part of the basics of safeguarding business continuity and preventing any data loss. So is the setup of a firewall, which is also available with Worldstream’s dedicated servers. 

On top of that, adding DDoS protection to mitigate distributed denial of service attacks for your dedicated server could also be seen as part of the server’s basic security tactics. Backed by our global 10Tbit/s network, Worldstream’s DDoS Shield provides you with custom DDoS mitigation options. 

As said, these are in fact just some of the basic security options for a dedicated server. Our dedicated servers come with root access by default, which allows you to further optimize the security design from the server-side up to the application stack, end-to-end so to say. When developing applications, it may also help you align server-side security with the requirements of the apps to build a secure chain and prevent any conflicts in code. 

4. It gives you full engineering control over the backend of your IT infrastructure 

With a dedicated server, your applications may benefit from the alignment options being provided and the complete control you have over the server configuration, as dedicated servers most of the time come with root access. It can help you optimize virtually any part of your server, including the software, hardware, as well as the operating system (OS). So, dedicated servers provide for a great deal of control, allowing you to fine-tune your backend settings. With root access, it even allows you to change program code.

Dedicated servers provide the option to configure the environment end-to-end to run specific applications with unique demands. For example, you have complete control over the server software you use. If you prefer NGINX’s resource control over Apache’s, you have the option to do so. If you want to get the most out of server-side caching, you can do so. It may also include optimization of the amount of bandwidth and memory you need, for instance. Worldstream’s unmanaged dedicated server offerings have a wide range of modular options by the way, to meet all unique requirements, while these solutions are backed by Worldstream’s 10Tbit/s global network with ample bandwidth available. Of course, you’ll have to bring some engineering knowledge to gain the advantages of having full engineering control over your dedicated servers. When the engineering knowledge is present though, you can truly reap the benefits of this backend control. Keep in mind that Worldstream engineers have an average response time of 7 minutes, which means that you’re not on your own when deploying and configuring your dedicated server. 

5. It prevents you from creating overhead while it may safeguard your uptime 

When deploying a server room at your own premises, or when you’re co-locating your IT infrastructure with a data center operator (btw, did you know that Worldstream as an IaaS-provider operates its own data centers as well, highly energy efficient ones actually?), you’ll have to purchase the equipment and spare parts for the server infrastructure yourself. As dedicated servers most of the time are being rented, they help you reduce the overhead and prevent excessive expenses for buying, configuring and maintaining server equipment. Furthermore, when co-locating or operating your own server room, in case of component failures, your engineers are still responsible for the uptime of the server infrastructure. Time which they’d better safe for professionally managing your IT infrastructure applications. 

Reputable providers of server infrastructure will be able to provide you with service level agreements (SLAs) for your dedicated servers, at least Worldstream does. It would probably provide you with even better uptime guarantees when compared to letting your own engineers do the job. In that case you can rest assured that the basic infrastructure for keeping your applications up and running is truly taking care of. 

6. With dedicated servers, you lay a foundation for IT infrastructure flexibility

Cloud hosting is well known for its high flexibility and scalability options, especially public cloud, but so are dedicated servers. It may depend on your use case which flexibility option best suits your hosting needs. Although often you don’t even have to choose. With a hybrid setup including dedicated servers and access to public cloud via onramps - as also possible at Worldstream - you could combine the best of both worlds and take flexibility for your IT infrastructure to the next level. Besides, dedicated servers with root access give you ultimate control thus flexibility over how things can be deployed on the server.

Depending on the hosting provider, dedicated servers may come with high customization options, allowing you to flexibly tailor the CPU, software, RAM, disk space, and a variety of other aspects of the servers for your IT infrastructure. The higher the flexibility levels, the easier it will be for your IT department to exactly match it to your applications and perhaps also some on-premises equipment. 

For those searching for flexible-to-deploy dedicated servers it’s good to know that Worldstream’s IT services web shop has a fine-grained, modular setup that breathes B2C convenience. It is aimed at flexibly composing truly unique IaaS configurations, allowing you to select dedicated servers, components and accompanying services without having to make the additional call. Although our engineers are more than happy to have a chat with you and help you out; as said, their average engineering response time is 7 minutes.  

To learn more about Worldstream’s dedicated server offerings and its high customization options, visit our dedicated server configurator here.

You might also like:

• Reports are showing a growing number of DDoS attacks.
• Case Study: DAEL Group. 
• Is cloud computing complementary to your IT Infrastructure?

Have a question for the editor of this blog post? You can reach us  here.