Hosting Models
Dedicated Server
A physical machine rented entirely to you, with no other tenants sharing its CPU, memory, or disk.
With a dedicated server you rent the whole physical box. No other tenants, no virtualization overhead, every clock cycle and every gigabyte is yours. Workloads that hammer the CPU nonstop, need predictable disk throughput, or have licensing tied to physical cores tend to land here.
Hetzner and OVHcloud are known for aggressively priced dedicated hardware, and Leaseweb and Liquid Web target the higher-touch end with managed options. The trade-off against cloud is flexibility: you can't resize a physical machine with an API call, and if it dies you wait for hands in the data center.
For most sites a dedicated server is overkill. A VPS or a scalable cloud setup gets you 90% of the performance with a fraction of the commitment. Reach for bare metal only when you've measured a real ceiling.
Go deeper
- VPS vs Dedicated vs Cloud HostingHow the three hosting models differ in cost, control, and scalability.