Most server sizing goes wrong in one of two directions: paying for cores that idle at 3% for a year, or discovering at launch that the database's hot set doesn't fit in RAM. Both mistakes come from skipping the same step: sizing from the workload instead of from a price list. This guide gives you the method (baseline, headroom, growth), the per-workload heuristics for CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth, and the honest answer to when you should scale up versus out.

A game server is a single-threaded simulation loop on a fixed clock, so it lives or dies on per-core speed and steady timing, not core count. A shared VPS puts a hypervisor's scheduler between that loop and the CPU, and the jitter shows up as missed ticks. Bare metal removes the layer. This pillar covers bare metal against a VPS and managed game panels, why clocks beat cores, real RAM figures for Minecraft, Rust, ARK, Palworld, Valheim and CS2, storage and DDoS reality, running Pterodactyl or its Pelican fork yourself, and the honest cases where a VPS is still the right call.

Bare metal wins on the two numbers that decide whether a game server feels good: worst-case tick time and worst-case latency. A single-tenant VM on hardware you control gets close. An oversold multi-tenant VPS is where fixed-tick simulation falls apart, because a vCPU scheduled a few milliseconds late is a missed tick every player sees as rubber-banding. This guide covers what a hypervisor adds to a tick loop, why the 95th-percentile tick time matters more than average throughput, how to measure steal time and MSPT on your own server, and when a VM is still the right call.

A Linux dedicated server gives you a whole physical machine with no hypervisor in the way, but which distribution should you run on it? Ubuntu, Debian, the CentOS successors, and RHEL each make different trade-offs around release cadence, support, and cost. This guide explains what a bare-metal Linux server actually is, when it beats a VPS or cloud instance, and how to pick a distribution by workload and support needs, with a side-by-side comparison and links to the right server for each.

A freshly provisioned server starts receiving SSH probes within minutes of its IP going live; honeypot studies show most exposed machines are attacked within a day. The good news: the defences that matter are a short, boring, one-hour checklist, not a security research project. This guide walks the eight steps in order (users and SSH keys, firewall baseline, automatic updates, fail2ban, time sync, a listener audit, and logging) with the exact commands for Debian/Ubuntu and the RHEL family, plus an honest list of what not to waste your first hour on.