All Articles

Most of the electricity grid in Noord-Holland is full for new or larger connections from big users, and Amsterdam has stopped new data centres, and expansions of existing ones, until 2035. Servers already running in Amsterdam keep their power. The shortage is in new capacity: another building, a bigger grid connection, or a denser rack in an existing hall.

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.

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.

Three separate latencies sit between a futures platform and a matching engine, and only one of them is a hosting decision. This guide separates them, then gives the figures we measured from our own Chicago facility to the broker gateways a NinjaTrader or Tradovate setup actually connects to: 0.2 ms to Rithmic's market-data gateway, under 1 ms to its order gateway, about 3 ms to CQG's. The question that follows is not really "VPS or dedicated". Both sit in the same city and cover the same distance, so neither is closer to anything. What changes is who else is scheduling the CPU while your strategy is trying to finish a calculation, which is a question about load, not about milliseconds on a map.

Proxmox VE is a free, open-source virtualisation platform that runs directly on a physical server, turning one machine into a host for full virtual machines and lightweight containers. But it is not the only bare-metal hypervisor: VMware ESXi, XCP-ng, and Hyper-V all solve the same problem differently, and the right choice depends far more on licensing, clustering, and your team's ecosystem than on raw features. This guide explains what Proxmox VE actually is, what a bare-metal hypervisor means, and how the four main contenders compare on cost, management, high availability, storage, and backup, with a side-by-side table, an opinionated decision framework, and links to the right server to deploy it on.

Almost every Proxmox-vs-ESXi comparison is written for a homelab or by a backup vendor. This one is written for the person renting a dedicated server or running a small hosting fleet, where the constraints are IPMI-only recovery, single-tenant hardware, no SAN, and network configured at the host. It covers what the Broadcom licensing shift actually changed, what the reintroduced free ESXi can and cannot do, the bare-metal architecture differences that matter, the multi-node failure modes that bite in production (and their fixes), honest per-node cost math, and where ESXi still wins.

RAID decides two things about your server before it ever boots: how much of the storage you're paying for is usable, and what happens at the moment a drive dies. Neither decision is reversible without rebuilding the array, so it's worth getting right at order time. This guide explains the four levels that matter in practice (0, 1, 5, and 10) plus ZFS's take on the same ideas, with honest guidance on rebuild risk, what RAID does not protect against, and which level fits which workload.

Three Ubuntu LTS releases are in service right now: 22.04 approaching the end of standard support, 24.04 in its comfortable middle years, and the new 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" with Linux 7.0. Which one belongs on your server depends on where you are in the cycle, and the answer is different for new deploys and existing fleets. This guide gives the support-window table, what actually changed in 26.04 for server operators, the honest reasons to stay on 24.04 for now, and the upgrade mechanics, including when the LTS-to-LTS path opens after 26.04.1.

Ubuntu is built from Debian, so this is a comparison between close relatives: same package format, same init system, largely the same administration. The real differences are cadence, support windows, kernel freshness, and who stands behind the updates: a fixed two-year LTS rhythm with optional paid coverage to 2036, versus a community release that's done when it's done and free forever. This guide lays out what the two actually share, where they genuinely differ, and which server workloads favour which, with current versions and support dates, not folklore.

Debian 12 "bookworm" quietly crossed a line in June 2026: regular security support ended, and it now runs on LTS. Debian 13 "trixie" has meanwhile matured through seven point releases, which makes this the right moment to do the in-place upgrade. This guide covers the full procedure for a remote production server: the pre-flight checklist (including the interface-renaming trap that can cut a remote box off mid-upgrade), the three-command upgrade itself, and the trixie-specific changes to check afterwards: /tmp on tmpfs, the sysctl move, and OpenSSH 10.

A Windows dedicated server gives you a whole physical machine running Windows Server directly on the hardware, but which version and edition should you run on it? Windows Server 2019, 2022, and 2025 sit at different points on the support timeline, and Standard versus Datacenter changes what you can do with virtualisation. This guide explains what a bare-metal Windows server actually is, when it beats a VPS or cloud instance, and how to pick a version and edition by workload, support window, and licensing, with a side-by-side comparison and links to the right server.