Bare metal and dedicated server describe the same thing: one physical machine, rented whole, with no hypervisor and no other tenant on it. The confusion is not about the hardware. It is about which era of hosting vocabulary a provider is using, and that vocabulary tends to predict how the machine is sold to you: by ticket or by API, by the month or by the hour. This guide explains where each term came from, lays out the operating-model differences a provider's word choice usually signals, gives you five questions to ask before you order, and covers the one case where neither term is what you actually want.