The mail difference between dedicated servers and cloud servers is that a "Dedicated Server" is a physical hardware appliance, while a "Cloud Server" refers to a virtual computing instance crated through virtualization. Cloud servers have many advantages like instant scalability, high availability and failover, but there are expensive to scale. The more computing resources we need the more expensive the cloud server gets.
Another term for a dedicated server hosting is a "Bare-Metal Server" which is used to underline that we use a physical server, not virtual one. The main advantage of the dedicated servers is that they allow administrators to fully customize the technology environment, something which is not possible on the in most Cloud computing environments.
Any dedicated server is a hardware appliance which is leased entirely for the business needs of one organization. The Bare-Metal servers are typically used by businesses that need a high level of security of all IT operations or by organisations that need to use a large amount of computing resources like processor (CPU), memory (RAM) and data storage.
Each dedicated server comes with certain hardware specifications, which allow the IT administrators to do customisations on a bare-metal technology level. For example, they can customize and set all service configurations, add and allocate capacity, plan the resource usage and even create virtual servers on top of a bare-metal server.
If your company need to host I/O demanding software applications - databases and big data platforms - you'd definitely choose to use a bare metal dedicated hardware, rather than going for a cloud server.
