When it comes to picking a provider for server hosting, business leaders must take several factors into consideration. Depending on the size and budget of one’s business, as well as one’s plans for growth and areas of interest, dedicated hosting can be an excellent option.
Others will opt for managed hosting, relinquishing some control over the technical aspects of their server in return for more hands-on assistance with servers when needed.
That said, small businesses have much to gain from dedicated hosting. Leaders at these firms must make the right choices from the outset to make the most of their options and not lock themselves into a deal that outpaces their needs or budgets.
By following a few simple dos and don’ts, leaders can ensure they stay on top of costs and meet their needs using the latest hardware offerings.
Hosting: What to do
1. Weigh up your workloads
Before signing up for dedicated hosting, it’s important that leaders provision workloads with an understanding of what their short, medium, and long-term compute needs might be.
With generative AI workloads becoming an increasingly common consideration for businesses, many firms are facing a sharp uptick in the amount of processing capabilities they will need. While many will choose to access AI via the public cloud, circumventing the need for AI-ready servers altogether, others will opt to run AI models on dedicated servers for better oversight
One of the chief benefits of dedicated hosting is that businesses get full control of their configurations and settings. This can be a boon when it comes to optimizing workloads to hardware, with businesses getting to configure the hardware on which their dedicated server runs as well as the operating system and workloads it hosts.
For example, AMD’s EPYC family of server processors can offer improved performance for AI workloads, having been optimized for AI inference. A business could choose to leverage EPYC processors in tandem with a custom-built AI model, to run securely on their server for tailored AI outputs.
2. Assess pricing in the long-term
If you’re running a small business, it’s worth weighing up the differences in price offered for dedicated hosting versus managed hosting.
Cloud content delivery firm Cloudflare uses AMD EPYC processors for its DDoS protection and internet traffic management work. It found that by adopting AMD chips over Intel for its Gen X servers, it was able to improve performance while cutting costs.
With this in mind, leaders should consider the long-term benefits of paying for dedicated hosting, particularly if they’re seeking more energy-efficient compute. Dedicated hosting can cut out the immediate CapEx of hardware such as central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), with a trade-off being the OpEx
New hardware is also more likely to be energy efficient, a key concern for those seeking improved data center sustainability in their medium-term plans. Savings through improved energy efficiency can be significant, especially if dedicated server providers run green data centers.
3. Embrace security and oversight
With a dedicated server to hand, businesses can quickly expand their data storage. If you’re assessing expanding your database in the cloud, dedicated servers offer a way to do this without losing oversight and ultimate control of one’s data.
Dedicated servers can be excellent solutions for storing large amounts of sensitive data as well for businesses looking to embrace better latency and bandwidth. As self-contained servers optimized for a business’ specific needs. So long as an organization’s security processes are in good shape, dedicated servers offer an extra wall of protection away from malware that could move laterally through public cloud infrastructure.
Returning to the subject of data and compute sustainability, dedicated servers offer businesses more control over the carbon footprint of their hardware and insight into where improvements can be made to cut energy costs. This strict oversight will be necessary, as Gartner predicts AI could account for 3.5% of world electricity consumption by 2030 and that the bulk of this will fall on traditional server rooms and dedicated server facilities.
Hosting: What to avoid doing
1. Overestimating your capabilities
When it comes to dedicated hosting, it’s important that leaders understand how ready their teams are to take on the burden of managing their own server hardware.
While this comes as a major benefit to some, it makes dedicated hosting quite unsuitable for firms with especially small businesses which may not have teams large enough to handle the responsibilities of maintaining their configurations and perimeter security.
This is especially true for a small business seeking to use dedicated hosting for sensitive data expansion or to run AI inference. Done improperly, the former could lead to a data breach and the latter could result in financial wastage or even disgruntled employees and customers.
2. Over-provisioning
It’s important not to overprovision when it comes to dedicated hosting services. While the latest and greatest hardware might seem enticing, particularly if you’re looking to leverage more novel technologies such as generative AI, spending always has to be justified against your business’ needs.
If you’re struggling to choose hardware for your dedicated server, such as the CPU family or the memory allocated to the instance, it’s time to revisit your expansion plans. For example, if you have a detailed plan for AI investment, you should be aware of the training or inference needs of the AI model you’re looking to leverage.
Depending on the urgency or detail of responses, you may be looking at using a pre-trained open source AI model which can require far less computing power to inference on your enterprise data than larger models need to be trained on proprietary data from scratch.
3. Feeling tied to legacy tech
In contrast to not overprovisioning, some leaders feel a need to stick with older server hardware simply because it’s there. While this may feel like prudence or smart-spending, it could end up hurting your business in the long run and might be a false economy.
Depending on the tasks your business is seeking to run on dedicated servers, newer hardware can end up saving your firm money through energy efficiency and improved processes at the other end of the stack.
Visual effects service provider CDW StudioCloud upgraded to Dell and AMD hardware in 2023 to meet the needs of its customers more efficiently, a move that meant abandoning its old tech stack. It found that the Dell PowerEdge servers, containing eight AMD EPYC processors, could outpace its existing cloud compute stack and that of render firms used by clients.
“The EPYC core counts attracted us to Dell and AMD,” says Kris Kostiuk, global director of Business Development, Media & Entertainment at CDW StudioCloud.
“We could replace three to four racks of our old compute with one rack of Dell PowerEdge servers powered by AMD CPUs. It was mind-blowing that we could use the same 35-kilowatt rack power in our data centers to fit 7,168 physical cores, whereas before we were in the 2,000-core range.
“This density allowed us to grow in the way we needed. We could retire some of our oldest compute without taking on more space and power, enabling massive energy efficiency.”
Leaders must lead the charge
Dedicated hosting brings myriad benefits to businesses willing to embrace it. Ultimately, though, it falls to leaders to know the needs of their own business and customers and formulate a clear strategy in line with these considerations.
It’s also about balancing current priorities with future needs. Importantly, decision-makers must also choose carefully between business-as-usual concerns and innovation to ensure the organization is set up for success both now and in the future.
Dedicated servers are a powerful tool that complements on-premise workloads and those in the public cloud and one that will only become more relevant as businesses are put under pressure to adopt newer technologies.
