When a B2B company, an IT agency or a cloud service provider (IaaS) starts growing, physical infrastructure becomes a central question in its scalability and cost-reduction strategy. Should you keep renting compute capacity through a Dedicated Server (Bare Metal) service, or invest in your own hardware (CAPEX) and place it in a datacenter through Colocation (Housing)?
This comparison sheds light on one of the most important architecture decisions IT leaders have to make.
What Is a Dedicated Server (Bare Metal)?
With a dedicated server, you rent a physical machine that is already assembled, powered and connected to the network by a provider. Infrawire, for instance, offers High-Performance Dedicated Servers powered by Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC chips, hosted on AS210699.
✅ Advantages of a Dedicated Server
- OPEX model (zero upfront hardware investment): no need to pull €20,000 out of your cash flow to buy enterprise-grade processors, RAM and NVMe SSDs. Everything is included in the monthly fee.
- Hardware warranty (RMA): if a hard drive or a RAM stick burns out at 3 AM, that's the hosting provider's problem. Infrawire's Remote Hands replace the failed part free of charge, transparently.
- Instant deployment: you confirm your order, and the server is booted and delivered with the operating system of your choice within 20 minutes.
❌ Limits of a Dedicated Server
The trade-off for this convenience: if you rent over a very long period (3 to 5 years) and need dozens of machines, the total cost will inevitably end up exceeding that of buying the hardware outright. And your hardware choices remain limited to the provider's catalog.
What Is Datacenter Colocation (Housing)?
Housing / Colocation means you buy your own hardware. You assemble it yourself, then physically install it (or ship it) into racks (10U racks, quarter rack 1/4, half rack 1/2 or full rack 42U/47U) housed in the provider's datacenter.
You then pay only for:
- The physical space ("U") you actually occupy in the rack.
- Electrical power (typically backed by generators and UPS units for high availability) and its HVAC cooling.
- Network traffic / peering (BGP) / IP transit.
✅ Advantages of Colocation
- Absolute hardware control: you can build custom configurations that no standard rental provider offers (specialized accelerators, FPGA, ASIC cards, dense NAS/SAN storage in the hundreds of TB, InfiniBand networking).
- Long-term amortization (ROI): once the hardware CAPEX is absorbed (typically within 14 to 24 months), the monthly cost for power and IP drops drastically compared to dedicated rental.
- Software and legal independence: the hardware is yours.
❌ Drawbacks of Colocation
Responsibility. If a component blows up in the middle of the night, your team must either travel physically to the datacenter, or have stocked spare parts on site in advance and pay the provider's Smart Hands (remote hands) to swap the parts under an incident ticket. The equipment also depreciates on your books.
The Financial Equation: When Should You Switch?
The general CTO rule:
- Below 5 to 10 standard bare-metal servers, stay a tenant (dedicated servers). The cost/time/peace-of-mind ratio is unbeatable.
- When your hosting bills explode, or your architecture requires colossal local storage, buying your own machines for a quarter or half rack (colocation) in Paris often becomes profitable by year two.
Infrawire Hosts You at Equinix PA5
We provide our B2B customers with Premium Housing and Colocation at the Equinix PA5 Datacenter, one of the nerve centers of the Internet in France.
Whether you need to house a single rackmount server (1U) with BGP announcement of your own IPs, or rent a locked half rack for your entire IT system, Infrawire combines its 100 Gbps core network and operator-grade Anti-DDoS protection with Equinix's Tier-level security.