Managed Dedicated Server – The Future Of SaaS Hosting

Software-as-a-Service has become the well-liked way to deliver applications over a previous couple of years. It’s simple to grasp why. SaaS applications provide major control and elasticity than their native equivalents. Development teams can more simply build a minimal viable product using web technology, and the subscription payment model is well-established within the SaaS world — Something that smaller firms have struggled with for native applications.

There are 3 basic hosting choices for the server-side part of SaaS applications: colocation of owned hardware managed dedicated server hosting, and the cloud. Each has its benefits; however, there’s an inclination for SaaS developers to turn to cloud platforms without giving much abundant consideration to using bare metal.

In fact, several SaaS startups don’t offer enough thought to the benefits of managed dedicated server hosting compared to cloud or colocation. While IaaS and PaaS have their place, and colocation brings the advantages of bare metal to the table, in my expertise, managed dedicated servers are a superb selection for several SaaS developers.

Cloud Vs. Managed Dedicated Servers

The benefits of cloud platforms are well understood: they’re versatile, they’re agile, and on-demand pricing is a huge draw for SaaS startups. However, there also are inevitable compromises to choosing cloud platforms.

The most obvious of those is performance: IaaS and PaaS platforms don’t give the identical level of performance for each dollar spent on infrastructure. Cloud technology offers the highest flexibility, however at a price. Dedicated servers aren’t as agile as cloud servers, except for each dollar you pay, you get far better performance wherever it matters — process power and I/O.

Dedicated servers are, in some ways that, additional flexibility than cloud platforms, significantly PaaS platforms. When you lease a dedicated server, you decide that software package is installed on it, how its resources are used, and once it’s updated.

Virtualized or container-based infrastructure offers any number of benefits in development and production environments; however, you don’t need to offer that up when you opt for bare metal. Managed Dedicated Server gives the right platform for container-based app development and hosting. The tooling around container systems like Docker has improved massively over the last few years. Choosing dedicated servers with container-based development and deployment workflows provides SaaS developers with the simplest of both worlds: the power and responsibility of bare metal and the convenience and adaptability of containers.

Managed Dedicated Servers vs. Colocation

SaaS developers opt for cloud platforms as a result of they’d rather target building their applications than managing servers. Whereas colocation offers several of the benefits of managed dedicated servers, it imposes a better infrastructure management and maintenance burden. With colocation, firms get the highest performance and control; however management of the servers is largely their responsibility.

Managed dedicated servers sit nicely between cloud and colocation. They provide all the power of colocated hardware, however, they don’t demand a major up-front capital investment like colocation, and much of the day to day server management is taken care of by the hosting provider.