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Like many web hosting companies we sell both Fully Managed Bare Metal Servers and Fully Managed Virtual Private Servers (sometimes known as Virtual Machines or Cloud Machines). We wanted to take a little time to explain the difference between these two commonly purchased products from our range of web hosting options.
A Bare Metal server is a physical server (computer) that is placed in a rack in a data centre. If you rent a Bare Metal Dedicated Server from us you could actually visit our data centre racks in Maidenhead and physically stand beside and touch your server in the rack. It’s a physical machine and you have exclusive access to all the CPU Cores, RAM and Disk operations.
A Bare Metal Server is a perfect solution when you outgrow a VPS Server. Most of our IPs can move between our VPS Platform and our Bare Metal Racks in the same data centre so an upgrade from a VPS to a Bare Metal Server can be completed without any frustrating DNS changes.
Here is an example of a Fully Managed Bare Metal Server you can purchase from us in our UK Data Centre – we’re confident you will not find a fully managed server with ASL Security, cPanel and Managed Backups cheaper in the UK Market:
Intel Xeon E3-1270v5 Skylake Architecture
£229 + VAT* monthly or £2290 + VAT* annually.
A Virtual Private Server can be a great alternative to a Bare Metal Server. A larger server is segmented via software (XEN or KVM) and this allows you to purchase a block of resources specific to what you need for your websites and traffic. You can buy a number of CPU Cores, some RAM and some Disk Space and this is allocated just for you. It’s scalable up and down quickly so if you need more CPU & RAM for a weekend event, no problem! If you need to scale back that additional CPU & RAM after your event again no problem. It’s very flexible.
A Managed VPS Server is a perfect solution when you outgrow a Reseller or Multi Site Account or when you want complete isolation so your users do not share the same IP with others. It also is a good solution when a busy website outgrows a shared server and you do not have the budget available to move straight to Bare Metal.
Here is an example of a Fully Managed Virtual Private Server you can purchase from us in our UK Data Centre – remember when comparing prices with other providers we are Fully Managed, include a cPanel License, include ASL Security Suite, include a Remote Backup License and include Remote Backup Space.
£65 + VAT* monthly or £650 + VAT* annually
A Managed VPS server can be ready for you within a couple of hours – that being the time it takes to spin up the server, install the Operating System, install and configure cPanel and setup Backups and Name Servers. A Bare Metal Server can be ready in about 24-72 hours depending upon stock. We do keep our most popular models in stock so for these it’s 24 hours. For anything we need to order from our supplier it’s 72 hours.
So far as is possible, yes but remember there will be other VPS Servers residing on the same physical node but these are isolated either using XEN or KVM virtualization. You get a private IP address and you get full root access for your server. The resources allocated to you are allocated exclusively for you and cannot be shared with another user (unlike shared hosting). In this case then it is isolated. It’s also impossible for users to max out the port speed as our ports are gigE and our VPS Servers although fast are limited by our software so no one user can max out the switch port causing downtime for other users.
We have a 2 hour hardware replacement Service Level Agreement in place for our Bare Metal Servers with our providers and we do keep spare parts in stock. We also keep some common configurations on line as hot spares. If a VPS Fails we have lots of Nodes so we can quickly spin up a new server and restore from backups and move the IP address. Failure is rare as we have RAID arrays on all our servers but as with all hardware errors can happen so we have hardware available quickly to recover.
cPanel licenses cost more for Bare Metal Servers as do Backup Licenses and Softaculous Licenses. This does add a little to the cost of a Bare Metal Server but our prices include all this. Remember our servers are all Fully Managed so ensure you are comparing like with like if shopping around.
A VPS Server can be upgraded quickly. Need to add another 8GB RAM then as long as this is available on the physical node housing your VPS this can be done quickly and will only require a quick reboot to be applied. If you need to upgrade RAM in a Bare Metal Server you need to take it off line and physically replace or upgrade the RAM. For this reason a VPS is known to be very scalable and is useful if you need to quickly add more resources for a particular temporary need.
If you buy a Bare Metal Server with 8 CPU Cores you get complete access to all 8 cores for your processing needs with no contention. Even if you buy 8 equivalent CPU Cores on a VPS Server you are only buying Virtual Cores. This is why VPS Servers sometimes refer to cores as vCPU. A virtual core is not the same as a physical core. We do not oversell our servers as a matter of policy so with BWF we’re confident you will see great performance from our Virtual Cores.
Contact our sales team today and we can get you a free trial of a VPS Server. Bare Metal Servers by their very nature are exclusive for you so are exempt from free trials but none of our services have contracts so you will never be tied into a long contract with us. We do have some local clients who we know personally who are more than willing to give references if you need them in advance of committing to purchase a Bare Metal Server from us. Contact us for details.
*VAT is charged to UK / EU Customers where required by law at the prevailing rate. EU Clients can provide us with your EU Vat Number and we can remove VAT from your invoice.