Companies seeking to modernize specific systems or elements of their IT environment often engage cloud services rather than upgrading an on-premises data center. Cloud service providers (CSPs) typically offer a range of solutions, including virtual servers and shared public cloud hosting. Many organizations find these solutions sufficient to address their business needs.

When selecting bare metal hosting for enterprise, it is important to evaluate performance, security, compliance, and scalability needs, along with a thorough cost analysis. These factors help ensure the chosen solution meets both technical and budgetary requirements.

Enterprise clients often require more resources than they can obtain with a shared hosting environment. They may have mission-critical business applications or process sensitive information that is not a good fit for public cloud services. For these organizations, cost control and the ability to securely manage critical data are essential considerations. Bare-metal hosting offers an alternative solution that aligns with enterprise client requirements and objectives.

What is Bare Metal Hosting?

Bare-metal hosting is a cloud hosting model in which a single tenant provisions an entire physical server from a CSP. Customers do not share a virtualization layer with other clients, unlike public cloud solutions. They have full control of a dedicated server, without the capital expenses involved with purchasing and maintaining the hardware in an on-premises data center.

Account management is crucial for enterprise clients, as account-based services help manage servers efficiently and support critical applications, ensuring high availability and scalability within enterprise infrastructure.

Companies can alleviate many of their concerns about a shared cloud environment by using bare-metal servers. The characteristics of bare metal servers make them an attractive option for enterprise clients.

Bare metal servers also support a wide range of operating systems and distributions, including Windows, Ubuntu, and VMware ESXi.

Key Characteristics of Dedicated Bare Metal Servers

Bare metal servers are distinguished by several key characteristics that offer enterprise customers advantages over shared cloud services.

  • A dedicated server: Companies get exclusive use of the server and its associated resources. Businesses enjoy predictable, consistent performance because there is no competition for the environment’s processors, memory, storage devices, and network bandwidth. Clients are not affected by issues such as noisy neighbors, fluctuating demand, excessive network traffic, or hypervisor contention.
  • Complete administrative control: Teams have full control over their dedicated bare metal servers. They typically receive root or administrator-level access, enabling them to create a server tailored to their specific needs or business objectives. Organizations can install any operating system or hypervisor, providing greater flexibility and customization than shared environments. The infrastructure can be configured and optimized to address complex workloads.
  • Improved performance: Bare metal hosting environments run workloads directly on hardware, eliminating performance degradation that may affect virtual servers. Direct hardware interaction yields higher I/O throughput, low latency, and overall best performance for demanding, compute-intensive tasks.
  • Enhanced security: The single-tenant nature of a bare metal server provides enterprise clients with a stronger security posture. Sensitive or valuable data is isolated on the physical server, with no threats from other tenants. The lack of a hypervisor reduces the attack surface and the likelihood of compromise by threat actors. Teams can implement cybersecurity tools and processes, such as encryption and intrusion prevention, to protect their servers, which may not be available in a shared hosting environment.

Primary Uses of Bare Metal Servers

Enterprise clients adopt bare metal solutions to address various computing and business applications that shared public cloud services cannot adequately handle. Bare metal servers are also highly scalable, allowing businesses to seamlessly expand their infrastructure as their needs grow.

  • High-performance computing (HPC) workloads: Companies need maximum CPU throughput, high memory capacity, and high bandwidth, along with direct hardware optimization, for use cases such as scientific simulations, financial modeling, risk analytics, machine learning, and graphics rendering.
  • Big data analytics and data warehousing: Businesses with data-intensive applications benefit from localized file storage and high I/O throughput. The absence of potentially noisy neighbors avoids degraded query performance for data lakes and warehouses.
  • Private cloud and hypervisor hosting: Enterprise clients may leverage bare metal servers as the foundation for private clouds and VM clusters. The company gains performance and enhanced security while maintaining control of hypervisor policy.
  • Real-time applications: Companies supporting gaming, streaming, and other latency-sensitive digital services benefit from the direct hardware access provided by bare metal servers. Organizations can develop a successful online presence and offer users an improved experience to grow the business using reliable bare metal hosting.
  • AI/ML and GPU-intensive workloads: AI applications and machine learning training models require extensive GPU usage. The high-bandwidth local storage and exclusive control of GPUs make bare metal solutions a good fit for companies supporting these workloads.
  • Security-sensitive environments: Enterprise clients often favor single-tenant solutions that offer stronger security than public cloud offerings. The physical and logical isolation provided by bare metal supports the processing of protected health data and payment processing platforms. Physical isolation in bare metal hosting provides inherent security against breaches and lateral attacks prevalent in multi-tenant environments.
  • Highly customizable workloads: Businesses may select bare metal for its ability to customize the environment with operating system or kernel builds. Teams can tune performance parameters to meet objectives that cannot be met with shared solutions. Bare metal servers are designed to handle high volumes of processing and can support resource-intensive applications like CRM and ERP systems.

Are There Drawbacks to Bare Metal Servers?

Companies that want the control, performance, and high availability of bare-metal servers must be aware of several potential drawbacks to this hosting solution.

  • Increased operational responsibility: Customers must have the skills and experience to manage a bare metal environment. Client teams are responsible for security, patching, hardware monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery planning. Supporting bare metal servers requires skilled infrastructure teams and proven operational procedures.
  • Limited flexibility: Businesses have limited on-demand scalability with bare metal servers. Scaling up the environment typically involves capacity planning and reallocating hardware, which takes time and may affect the ability to support dynamic growth efficiently.
  • Slower provisioning and deployment: Customers may experience significant delays when provisioning bare-metal systems compared to spinning up a VM in the public cloud. Providers may need to physically move or reconfigure hardware to provision servers in response to client requests.
  • Higher costs: Organizations may face higher upfront costs, including fees for dedicated hardware, power, and cooling. Internal teams are required to maintain the operational efficiency of bare metal servers. However, bare metal hosting offers predictable pricing models optimized for workload and budget, with transparent pricing and cost-efficient hosting. Cost savings of up to 70% can be achieved with optimized pricing models, and bare metal hosting can eliminate public cloud egress fees. Dedicated servers in bare metal hosting are typically more cost-effective than public cloud solutions for constant demand workloads. Full control over server resources can also lead to better cost management and cost control.
  • Migration complexity: Companies may face difficulties when migrating a bare-metal environment to another provider. Differences in hardware architecture, network topology, and firmware can result in a time-consuming and complicated migration.

Scalability and Flexibility of Bare Metal Hosting

One of the standout advantages of bare metal hosting is its exceptional scalability and flexibility, which are crucial for businesses operating in fast-paced, ever-changing environments. With dedicated bare metal servers, organizations can provision servers and allocate more resources on demand, ensuring their infrastructure keeps pace with business growth or fluctuating workloads. This adaptability is especially valuable for companies running high performance computing, machine learning, or distributed storage solutions, where the ability to quickly scale up or down can directly impact business outcomes.

Bare metal servers are specifically designed to deliver consistent performance, even as demands shift. Whether supporting business applications that require high availability or managing workloads that need low latency and high performance, dedicated bare metal hosting provides the reliability and speed enterprises expect. The flexibility to customize storage, memory, and processing power allows businesses to optimize their hosting environment for a wide range of use cases, from mission-critical operations to innovative new projects.

By leveraging the scalability of bare metal hosting, companies can future-proof their IT infrastructure, respond rapidly to market changes, and maintain best in class performance for users around the world. This level of control and adaptability makes bare metal servers an ideal choice for organizations seeking to maximize both performance and operational efficiency in their hosting solutions.

How to Select a Bare Metal Hosting Provider?

Organizations should consider several factors when choosing their bare metal hosting provider.

Best in class hardware

The selected provider should offer best-in-class hardware that delivers the performance necessary to support high-performance computing tasks. Hardware choices should include making cutting-edge GPUs and processors available for advanced AI applications and machine learning training. Organizations should seek a provider that offers servers specifically designed to address their unique requirements.

Strong SLAs and hardware replacement policies

Providers must provide strong service level agreements (SLAs) regarding uptime and hardware replacement. Enterprise clients must ensure their vendors’ availability of spare hardware to address equipment failures with minimal downtime. The vendor should have a clearly defined incident response and escalation process. Questions to ask prospective providers include how quickly failed hardware, such as hard drives, will be replaced and whether spare parts are available on-site. Limited spare parts or vague SLAs are warning signs to avoid.

Data center location and network performance

Enterprise customers typically seek the bandwidth consistency and low latency of bare metal hosting. Providers with data centers in multiple regions can offer servers in closer proximity to users to streamline access to the environment. Companies should investigate the providers’ bandwidth and throughput ceilings to ensure they align with business requirements. Clients should look at network segmentation options that may be necessary to secure sensitive data assets. Reliable connection options, such as private networks, are important for optimal server management and security. Private networks also offer increased flexibility, allowing users to optimize network configurations without impacting service availability.

Compliance readiness

Businesses processing regulated data must consider their bare-metal provider’s compliance stance. Specific elements to look for include physical security aligned with compliance standards, access logging, and secure decommissioning to protect sensitive data. The provider should have environments designed to support various regulations, such as HIPAA or PCI-DSS. Vendors should support audits by tracking hardware custody and information collected in access and usage logs.

Customer support

Businesses should look for a provider that offers 24/7 operational support and SLA response. A reliable provider typically will offer deployment assistance and migration support. It is essential to work with a vendor that has engineer-led in-house support teams, not outsourced help desks. Ideally, the provider should have a track record of successfully supporting other clients in the same industry.

For personalized guidance or further assistance with your bare metal hosting for enterprise needs, contact our support team.

Conclusion

Bare-metal servers provide enterprise clients with numerous benefits to support a wide range of complex, computationally intensive tasks. The key for customers is to partner with a reputable vendor, such as Atlantic.Net, that offers a range of bare metal hosting options to address their unique business needs. We offer multiple plans to meet the needs of any enterprise client in 2026 and will customize the bare metal environment to match your company’s specific requirements.

For personalized guidance or further assistance with your bare metal hosting for enterprise needs, contact our support team.