When it comes to hosting data, the best solution is the one that is bespoke to your business needs. For many organizations – whether it’s to power a high-traffic website, store and process big data, or support mission-critical applications – the answer is a dedicated server solution.

Dedicated servers can have an important role in the infrastructure mix, offering organizations a unique combination of performance, security, and control. If you’re thinking about deploying a dedicated hosting solution for the first time, read on for four tips that will help your company unlock the full benefits of this high-performance, single-tenant option.

1. Don’t Start from Scratch

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when setting up your first hosted infrastructure with dedicated servers, as there are many tools in the market already to help you get started.

For example, at our company, we worked with an AdTech customer that built an infrastructure to treat their dedicated servers as if they were virtual. The tool they developed, which is open-source and available with step-by-step documentation on GitHub, allows the company to provision and manage their hardware as easily as virtual machines.

If you are hesitant about bringing a dedicated server online because you don’t know how to fix the software rate – there’s a solution for that too. You can reinstall the machine with one line of script, which has proven much easier and faster for our customer.

2. Keep It Simple(r)

If there is one mantra that guides many IT decisions, it is “simpler is better.”

With dedicated hosting, you don’t need to worry about the overly sophisticated solutions that often characterize other hosting platforms. Dedicated servers are entirely tied to the host site or application, which makes networking a far simpler function and introduces fewer points of failure compared to a cloud-hosted environment.

Cloud has become the golden child of IT, and there are countless use cases where cloud makes the most sense. However, cloud operations can also be highly complex. Unfortunately, complexity usually adds cost, both in terms of hardware and technical support. We’ll talk more about costs in a bit.

3. Run Servers Like a Cloud

Cloud is touted for its easy configurability and flexibility. The good news is that you can make dedicated servers work the same way using cloud-like automation.

By intelligently routing traffic, automation can help minimize the time spent having to manually configure server hardware. Organizations, like the AdTech customer mentioned previously, are using high levels of smart automation to redeploy available resources to where they will be most effective and provision additional machines if needed – without human intervention – to achieve the desired latency and performance levels.

Think of it as the best of both worlds, where you get the performance and security of dedicated hosting with the agility and responsiveness of the cloud.

4. Understand Total Cost of Ownership

Cost-savvy techies rejoice. A dedicated server solution won’t break the bank. To the contrary, it can provide greater performance and reliability at a lower cost than on-premise or other hosted solutions.

Unlike on-prem servers, which require a large upfront investment in addition to regular support and maintenance, dedicated server solutions are billed at a monthly rate. This makes dedicated hosting much easier on the budget than managing your hardware in house.

Cloud hosting ordinarily offers a cost advantage at the low end of the spectrum, but the cost savings start to evaporate as your organization scales and requires more resources. Dedicated servers, on the other hand, usually come with a higher entry cost, but deliver more reliable and cost-efficient scaling as your business or website traffic grows.

Make sure you consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) when deciding on a hosting solution, keeping both future and current growth in mind. Our AdTech customer found that it would cost seven times more to run their infrastructure on a cloud service than on dedicated servers. With dedicated hosting, their monthly bills are never a surprise.

Matching your computing platform to the needs of your business is the most crucial aspect of choosing the right solution. If uptime and performance are top priorities, dedicated servers can be a powerful choice, offering easy set-up, streamlined operations, automation capabilities, and value.