All too often, infrastructure performance is treated as a technicality, and only an issue for engineering teams to manage once an application is in production. But as the foundation for application performance, infrastructure should be considered as a business-wide priority.
Latency directly impacts user experience, throughput dictates traffic handling capacity, and predictability mitigates risk. When performance degrades, symptoms show up at the application layer, but the root cause usually sits at the hardware level.
This is why many businesses eventually reach a point where they start questioning their infrastructure strategies. Hyperscale cloud costs keep rising without meaningful performance gains, and demand spikes become harder to tolerate as workloads that should theoretically scale smoothly, don’t.
At this point, it’s not enough to just source ‘faster’ servers. You’ll need to understand what drives infrastructure performance, when to re-architect, and the criteria that matter most when comparing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers.
At a basic level, IaaS performance is driven by four measurable factors: compute, memory, storage and network. These are the building blocks most infrastructure buyers focus on first. But in modern production environments, raw specifications alone only tell part of the story.
Consistent performance under sustained load matters just as much, and this is where architectural design choices start to matter. Bare metal environments deliver more reliable performance compared to shared public cloud setups. That’s because single-tenant architectures eliminate virtualization overhead and give teams full hardware and network control. By contrast, virtualized architectures trade some of that predictability for rapid elasticity.
Whilst virtualization has matured to a point where performance loss is less of a concern than it once was, virtualized environments are still vulnerable to misconfigurations. One study that ran approximately 15,600 measurements across bare metal and virtual machines (VMs) observed performance losses of up to 72% in the case of non-optimized virtualization software. When performance availability measurements were taken across bare metal and virtualized environments, results showed that bare metal performance remained consistently stable across all components, whereas virtualization produced unpredictable results.
In other words, performance stability in virtualized environments is fragile – especially considering most businesses (some reports suggest up to 98%) do have misconfigurations in their cloud environments. Achieving ‘ideal’ results in these environments is the exception rather than the rule.
Achieving exceptional performance starts with purpose-designed architectures. For some teams, that might mean shifting to a bare metal-first approach, for others the sweet spot lies in a hybrid infrastructure strategy, combining the elasticity of virtualized compute with the performance stability of bare metal cloud.
Whichever architecture you choose, finding the right bare metal cloud partners to add into your mix is the first step. If you’re unsure what to look for, the following criteria will help you to identify providers of high-performance computing infrastructure.
1. Customization and control
Customization is a fundamental performance foundation. Fixed instance types and standardized environments make it easy to get started, but they also force workloads into predefined boxes. Over time, that mismatch between workload needs and infrastructure design becomes a performance bottleneck.
With servers.com, custom dedicated servers are designed around bespoke configurations, and the following components are all individually configurable:
Operating system (OS) type and installation method
RAM capacity
Disk type, quantity, RAID configuration and partitioning
Number of network interfaces and link aggregation
This flexibility enables teams to fine tune their hardware for specific performance goals. It’s precisely what enabled real-time video streaming platform, Ceeblue, to create a high-performance infrastructure foundation for their end-to-end transcoding, delivery and real-time origin services:
“servers.com knows our industry well and works closely with our team to tailor offerings that make sense, case by case. We’ve collaborated to co-develop all the hardware that we currently deploy,” said Jonas Blötz, VP of Engineering at Ceeblue. “servers.com provides us with the latest and greatest in hardware. Having access to a wide range of devices and components allows us to continually improve the performance and efficiency of our service.”
2. Modern, redundant hardware
Poor hardware quality degrades performance. Many IaaS providers advertise similar specifications, but not all hardware is sourced, deployed, or maintained to the same standard. Some providers may rely on mixed-generation components or loosely assembled systems, which can lead to instability and performance issues over time.
“To ensure all hardware is of the highest standard, servers.com maintains strong supply relationships with Dell and Supermicro and deploys latest-generation AMD and Intel CPUs,” said Evgenii Shabanov, Head of Product at servers.com.
“As well as selecting performant hardware, redundancy is also built in at every level. Each rack is powered by two independent power sources, reducing the risk any single failure has on availability or performance.”
For servers with a single power supply unit (PSU), an automatic transfer switch (ATS) switches power to the backup source in the event of power failure, ensuring no service interruptions.
