DS Entry
First dedicated box
$109 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 6 cores / 32 GB
- 2 × 960 GB NVMe
- Unmetered 1 Gbps
- IPMI included
Advertising disclosure. This article contains affiliate links. If you sign up with a hosting provider through one of them, RecordHosting.com may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend services we would use ourselves, and compensation never buys a better rating. See our full affiliate disclosure and the FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking.
In one paragraph
A dedicated server is an entire physical machine leased to you alone. No other customer's workload runs on the hardware, no hypervisor sits between your operating system and the CPU, and every resource on the box is yours whether you use it or not. It is the most expensive option, the most powerful per dollar at scale, and the easiest to defend when a regulator asks about tenant isolation.
When a dedicated server is the right call
- Hardware isolation is a requirement, not a preference — some healthcare, government and financial workloads say so explicitly
- Large record archives where storage cost per terabyte dominates the bill
- Database servers that need consistent I/O without a noisy neighbour on the same spindles
- Sustained high load — a busy box beats bursty cloud pricing on cost per request
- Specialist hardware — GPUs, very large memory, hardware security modules
- Licensing tied to physical cores, where virtualisation is expensive or prohibited
What to specify
| Build | CPU / RAM | Storage | Suited to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | 6 cores / 32 GB | 2 × 960 GB NVMe (RAID 1) | Consolidating a handful of busy sites |
| Application | 12 cores / 64 GB | 2 × 1.92 TB NVMe (RAID 1) | Line-of-business apps, agency hosting |
| Database | 16 cores / 128 GB | 4 × 1.92 TB NVMe (RAID 10) | Write-heavy databases, records systems |
| Archive | 8 cores / 64 GB | 4 × 16 TB HDD (RAID 6) + NVMe cache | Long-term retention at low cost per TB |
The questions that separate providers
- What is the hardware replacement SLA? A failed drive should be swapped in hours, not on the next business day.
- Is out-of-band management included? IPMI or a remote console means you can recover a broken boot without a support ticket.
- Who patches the OS? Unmanaged means you. Managed dedicated typically adds $80–$250 a month and is usually worth it.
- Where is the data centre, and what is it certified to? Ask for the current SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report, not a badge on a web page.
- What is the bandwidth commitment? Unmetered on a 1 Gbps port and 20 TB on a 10 Gbps port are very different products.
- What happens to the disks at end of life? For regulated records you want a documented, certified destruction process.
Dedicated hardware and compliance
Single-tenancy simplifies several conversations at once. There is no shared kernel to reason about, no co-tenant whose breach becomes your incident, and disk encryption keys can be held on hardware you control. It does not, on its own, make you compliant — you still need the contracts, the logging, the retention schedule and the access reviews. What it does is remove one of the harder questions from the assessment.
Single-tenancy answers “who else is on this machine?”. It does not answer “who at the provider can walk up to it?”. Ask about physical access controls, staff screening and the escort policy for the data-hall floor.
Indicative pricing
DS Application
Production workloads
$229 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 12 cores / 64 GB
- 2 × 1.92 TB NVMe
- Managed OS patching
- Off-site backup
DS Archive
Long-term records
$389 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 8 cores / 64 GB
- 64 TB raw (RAID 6)
- Encrypted at rest
- Certified disk destruction
Sponsored links. Prices are illustrative placeholders — swap in your provider's live pricing and affiliate URLs before publishing.
Ready to move on a dedicated server?
Compare current offers from the providers we work with, or tell us what you are hosting and we will point you at the right size of plan.
View current offers Ask us a question
Sponsored link. Indicative example pricing. Replace with your provider's live rates.