What do the bare metal dedicated servers give me

A whole machine rather than a slice of one. No hypervisor dividing the processor between you and other tenants, no allocation ceiling other than the hardware itself, and every disk in the chassis answering only to you. Configurations run from single-socket entry machines up to dual-socket builds with many times the cores and memory, in both the American and European facilities.

What bare metal actually changes

The honest answer is that for a content estate it is often not about raw speed. A well-cached site on a virtual server is fast. What a dedicated machine gives you is the absence of contention and the absence of ceilings:

• Nothing else is running. Your slowest page is slow because of your own workload, which makes performance problems tractable instead of mysterious.
• The disks are yours. Layout and redundancy level are chosen at order time rather than inherited.
• The address capacity is much larger. A single machine can carry far more addresses than a shared account, which matters when a big estate should sit on one box.

Choices made at order time

Some decisions are made when the machine is built rather than afterwards, so they are worth thinking about before you order: the redundancy level across the disks, the operating system, whether you take a control panel licence, and the memory and storage configuration. Redundancy in particular is built at provisioning, so changing it later means rebuilding the array.

Redundancy is also not backup, and the distinction catches people out. A mirrored array survives a failed disk. It does not survive a deleted directory, which is what backups are for.

Where the addresses fit

Addresses are bought independently of the hardware and attach to it in the ordinary way, drawn from the same inventory every other product here draws from. The machine is one purchase and the allocation is another, and the second can grow without the first being touched.

That is the arrangement most large estates end up in: one machine, many addresses, one account. It is also why moving up to metal does not mean rebuilding the separation you already had.

Is it the right step

Take it when the workload genuinely needs the whole machine, or when the estate is large enough that consolidating onto one box is simpler than administering many accounts. Do not take it as a status upgrade. A virtual server with root covers most of what people think they need metal for, at a fraction of the cost.

Configurations and current rates are on USA dedicated servers and the European page. Migration onto the machine is included and is described in Migration Basics.