All four Clouders server lines are single-tenant bare metal. What differs is the resource each one is built around. The quickest way to choose is to identify the resource your workload runs out of first — its bottleneck — and pick the line designed for it.
Start with the bottleneck
Ask what limits your workload today, or what you expect to limit it as it grows:
- General load across CPU, memory and disk with no single extreme → Dedicated.
- Availability — the cost of downtime is the main concern → Enterprise.
- Capacity — the amount of data you need to store → Storage.
- Compute — cores, memory bandwidth or fast scratch storage, saturated for long periods → Advanced.
Dedicated Servers
General-purpose bare metal and the usual starting point. Good for web applications, APIs, websites, game servers, development environments and self-hosted tools — workloads that benefit from consistent performance and full root access but don't push one resource to an extreme.
Enterprise Servers
Choose Enterprise when an outage is expensive: core databases, ERP and CRM systems, production SaaS and private virtualisation platforms. The emphasis is on redundant components (as stated per configuration) and hardware sized for sustained load. For the highest availability, plan for more than one server so a whole machine can fail without stopping the service.
Storage Servers
Choose Storage when the data set is the main requirement: backup targets, archives, media libraries, file shares and self-hosted object storage. Pay attention to the RAID level, because it decides how much raw capacity becomes usable — see Choosing a RAID level.
Advanced Servers
Choose Advanced for compute-heavy jobs that keep every core busy: rendering, encoding, build and CI farms, simulation, analytics and in-memory databases. These workloads benefit most from high core counts, large memory and fast NVMe storage.
Quick comparison
| Line | Built around | Typical workloads |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated | Balanced, general-purpose | Web apps, APIs, game servers, dev & CI |
| Enterprise | Reliability | Databases, ERP/CRM, production SaaS, private cloud |
| Storage | Capacity | Backups, archives, media, file & object storage |
| Advanced | Compute performance | Rendering, builds, simulation, analytics |
Still unsure?
Mixed workloads are common — for example an application on a Dedicated server with backups on a Storage server. Describe what you run to sales@theclouders.com and we'll recommend a line and configuration.