DEDICATED SERVER

A dedicated server is a physical machine rented to one customer, with no other tenants sharing its CPU, RAM, storage or network. You get full control of the hardware specification, the operating system, the software stack and the network configuration. Dedicated servers suit high-traffic sites, large databases, compliance-sensitive workloads, game servers and any project that needs predictable performance or specific hardware that virtualisation cannot match. Prices start around $80 per month and scale into the thousands for high-end specifications. The leading providers are OVHcloud, Hetzner, Liquid Web and Hivelocity.

How it works

The provider supplies the physical machine, the rack space, the power, the cooling and the network. You pick the CPU (often Xeon or EPYC), the RAM, the storage (NVMe, SSD, HDD), the network speed, and the operating system. The hardware is yours alone for the duration of the contract.

Why it matters

For workloads that need consistent performance with no noisy-neighbour risk, specific hardware (NVMe at a certain spec, a particular CPU generation), or compliance that benefits from physical isolation, dedicated is the right step up from VPS. The trade is higher cost and longer provisioning times than virtual machines.

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Frequently Asked Questions