The Complete Handbook to Dedicated Servers: From Setup to Maintenance

Harold P. Wade

22.03.2023

With the rapid expansion of the digital landscape, the demand for bandwidth consumption and traffic volumes is increasing at a significant rate. This creates immense pressure on hosting infrastructure to deliver exceptional performance, data privacy, and accessibility across various devices and locations.

Meeting the high expectations of consumers for on-demand services adds to the challenge. Ensuring smooth application performance and quick content loading is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image, surpassing competitors, and providing a seamless user experience.

If you're considering dedicated servers as a new or replacement hosting solution, our comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know. We examine the features that make dedicated servers a suitable option for scaling your business, compare them with other hosting solutions, and provide an overview of the choices offered by dedicated server companies. Before delving into specifics, let's start with the basics.

Dedicated Servers: Everything You Need to Know

Dedicated servers refer to physical machines rented exclusively to a single user, company, or application. As a user, you get the entire server to yourself, without sharing it with other customers, providing full root access and complete control over resource configuration.

The main reason for opting for dedicated servers is the need for more computing power and control. This is particularly relevant for businesses with compute-intensive or latency-sensitive workloads, or specific security requirements. Dedicated servers can also address issues with your current hosting, such as traffic spikes, slow application speeds, or security breaches.

Upgrading to dedicated servers is common when you need to run processor-demanding or disk I/O-intensive workloads, eliminate lag during traffic spikes, minimize exposure to security breaches, or customize your hosting technology with ease.

In summary, dedicated servers provide high-level benefits and key drivers for improving your hosting situation. At Сrypadvise, we offer a range of high-powered dedicated servers with cloud flexibility and world-class 24-7 support.

Advantages of using dedicated servers

Dedicated servers are widely known for their superior hosting capabilities, making them a popular upgrade from shared hosting. With dedicated servers, you get increased processing power, access to the latest software, and the ability to easily deploy additional servers as your business grows.

As the sole user of your dedicated servers, you have complete control and the ability to optimize the servers as needed. Additionally, single-tenant dedicated servers offer advanced customization options, providing a more robust system architecture.

One of the most significant benefits of dedicated servers is their high performance. Since there is no sharing of bandwidth or compute resources, you can expect more RAM and storage, higher levels of server uptime, improved latency and round-trip times, faster response rates and loading speeds, and increased application resiliency.

Dedicated servers also provide robust security, allowing you to choose and install your preferred security software and carry out updates yourself. This approach helps avoid the potential pitfalls of multi-tenanted server architecture.

Furthermore, renting dedicated servers from one provider can save you both time and money, providing flexibility and simplicity in managing your hosting needs. Finally, dedicated servers offer endless scalability, enabling you to add extra RAM, storage, and deploy new servers as needed.

Dedicated Server Hosting: The Key to High-Performance Websites

By switching to dedicated servers, you can fully utilize the bandwidth, memory, and processing power of your server since you won't have to share resources with other users. This results in increased customization and consistently higher performance for your business.

With dedicated servers, there is no need to worry about the impact other tenants may have on your application performance or security.

Additionally, dedicated servers offer a more secure single-tenant environment, which is particularly important for applications processing sensitive financial or personal data, as a security breach on a shared server can put all hosted applications at risk.

Who Can Benefit from the Customization and Security Offered by Dedicated Server

Dedicated servers can play a crucial role in the success and growth of a variety of industries, including gaming, FinTech, streaming, AdTech, and iGaming.

For gaming, dedicated servers ensure a smooth and seamless gaming experience without lag or glitches.
FinTech services need secure and reliable hosting infrastructure to process sensitive data.
Streaming businesses require low latency and round-trip times for fast content delivery.
AdTech companies need fast and reliable hosting infrastructure to avoid high network latency and missed bid opportunities.
Finally, iGaming platforms must comply with complex industry standards and regulatory requirements, which can be achieved through dedicated servers.

An In-Depth Look at How Dedicated Servers Function

Dedicated servers are available in a variety of shapes, sizes, and specifications, with the unique feature of being single-tenant. This means that you'll rent the physical server exclusively for your use, without having to share it with other users or rely on virtualization technology, as with shared or cloud hosting.

While the chassis provider and CPU are generally fixed, you'll have the flexibility to customize and scale RAM, disks, operating systems, and server-wide applications according to your needs. It's essential to understand the maximum configuration of resources for each dedicated server and discuss it with your provider.

Customizing dedicated servers makes them the best option for businesses with critical workloads and applications.

Are dedicated server companies worth the investment?

Dedicated server providers bear the costs of several elements that form the backbone of their infrastructure, including data center space, power, cooling, support staff, network engineers, server and network equipment procurement and maintenance, and OS license purchasing and installation. These expenses are factored into the monthly fee charged to customers, and the contract length determines how long the customer is tied to the hardware.

Dedicated server companies typically offer contracts ranging from daily to 36+ months, with longer contracts often resulting in lower monthly fees. However, customers may prefer shorter contracts for more flexibility in scaling up or down. Crypadvise provides a variety of dedicated servers that offer cloud-like flexibility and scalability, with quick provisioning times and fast connections of up to 40Gbps per server.

Why Dedicated Servers Are the Best Choice for High-Performance Workloads

Every business has different needs, and therefore there are various hosting solutions available. These include shared hosting, VPS, cloud, and dedicated servers. Each works differently, with different levels of performance, customization, and cost.

Shared hosting involves dividing a physical server's resources among multiple customers, without isolation. This option may be suitable for low-bandwidth users but may struggle with high traffic volumes. With VPS hosting, a hypervisor splits the server into multiple virtual machines that behave as independent accounts, with each VM having its own OS and unable to interact with other VMs on the server.

Public cloud hosting is similar to VPS in that it uses a hypervisor to divide server resources among multiple virtual machines, but it also offers the flexibility and scale of cloud hosting. However, as with shared hosting options, users are still sharing server infrastructure with multiple customers, which can result in performance issues and security risks.

Dedicated servers, on the other hand, offer exclusive use of physical servers without virtualization technology. This makes them the best choice for organizations with critical applications and workloads that require high performance and customization. While shared options may be suitable for smaller organizations, dedicated servers offer greater control over security and performance, with the option to customize resources and scale up as needed.

Choosing Between Unmanaged and Managed Dedicated Servers

When it comes to renting dedicated servers, one important consideration is whether to choose an unmanaged or managed solution.

This decision should be made before researching hosting providers, as most companies specialize in one option or the other.

Unmanaged dedicated servers come with benefits such as the hosting provider taking responsibility for purchasing equipment and offering service level agreements on hardware replacement, power, and network. They also provide options for pre-licensing and installing the operating system.

Managed dedicated servers, on the other hand, offer all the services provided by unmanaged solutions, but with additional benefits such as the hosting provider installing and maintaining the OS and standard applications like PHP, .NET, Apache, and NGINIX.

They also offer a more bespoke set-up with greater overall management of your dedicated servers.

When choosing between managed and unmanaged dedicated servers, businesses need to consider factors such as their in-house expertise, resources, and specific needs. Managed servers are suitable for those lacking expertise or requiring ongoing support, while unmanaged servers are ideal for those with sufficient resources and expertise to manage their own servers.

Managed servers offer extensive support services, including server administration and maintenance, while unmanaged servers require businesses to manage their own hardware and components. Both options offer root access, but managed solutions may sacrifice customization for convenience and come at a higher cost.

Dedicated servers are a premium hosting option for businesses that require high performance, reliability, and security for their applications. They are suitable for applications that experience high traffic volumes, thousands of concurrent requests, or handle sensitive data. While dedicated servers are more expensive, the exact cost will depend on several factors, so businesses should carefully consider their requirements when reviewing dedicated server companies.

If you're looking to upgrade to dedicated servers, our team can provide you with fast and reliable service. We offer the ability to provision and deploy dedicated servers in any of our global data centers in 40 minutes or less, allowing you to get up and running quickly. You can choose the model and configuration of your server, and we'll take care of the rest. Whether you need assistance with specific requirements or want more information, our team is available to help.

Blog