This form logs you into your management portal account. To access your help desk account, click here and use the form to the right of the news.
This form logs you into your management portal account. To access your help desk account, click here and use the form to the right of the news.
Managed bare metal servers are among the most popular infrastructure hosting options for small businesses because they provide flexibility and power at a reasonable price.
Small businesses have several server hosting options available to them: onsite servers, colocated servers, and the public cloud are popular choices, but in this article I’m going to focus on the facts you need to make an informed choice about whether a bare metal server is the right choice for your business.
Bare metal servers offer the best performance of any hosting option. Each is an enterprise-grade rack-mounted server packed with cutting-edge components designed for optimal performance and reliability.
In practical terms, that means a bare metal server is a good option for any scenario in which performance is an issue, including to host web sites and applications, mobile application backends, virtual machines, game servers, eCommerce stores, and databases.
In addition to raw performance, bare metal servers often offer the best price to performance ratio. Bare metal servers aren’t as elastic or easily deployed as cloud servers, which should be taken into consideration if rapid scaling is something your workload requires, but with a bare metal server you’ll get the most power for the least cost.
While not as elastic as cloud platforms, bare metal servers are scalable enough for most workloads. There are two types of scalability applicable to bare metal servers: vertical scaling, also known as scaling up, and horizontal scaling, which is sometimes called scaling out.
Vertical scaling is moving to a more powerful server. If a company’s existing server isn’t cutting it, the process of moving to a more capable server — one with more RAM or processor cores — is relatively straightforward. Migrating between servers is not a difficult process.
Horizontal scaling is the deployment of additional servers that take some of the burden. A typical example would be a content management system that was originally hosted on a single server. When that server comes under increased load, the site’s owner might choose to move the database to a different server, or to deploy multiple web servers, each of which handles a proportion of requests.
Bare metal servers are available in a wide range of configurations and can be customized for individual use cases. The least powerful bare metal servers are inexpensive and more than capable of supporting a moderately popular website. The most powerful servers have hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and dozens of processors. They are capable of supporting almost anything a small business might want to throw at them — and if the business runs up against the limits of vertical scaling, they can always scale out and add more servers.
Managing a server isn’t for everyone. It requires some knowledge of server operating systems, services, and security. But with a good bare metal server management program, much of that can be handled by the server vendor.
Steadfast’s basic management plan includes 24/7 phone support, a 99.99% availability Service Level Agreement, operating system patching for security, and ongoing security auditing.
Most of us are familiar with the Windows operating system and most of the applications we use every day run on Windows. The most popular server operating systems are the various distributions of Linux, but companies that are familiar with Windows and the Microsoft ecosystem are free to choose their preferred version of Windows Server on any of Steadfast’s bare metal servers.
Bare metal servers are fast, economical, flexible, and available with the management services and operating system of your choice, making them the ideal server solution for many small businesses.
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