When choosing infrastructure for your projects, you'll encounter three main options:

A physical machine entirely dedicated to your use. Example use case:

# Typical dedicated server specs (bare metal)
CPU: Intel Xeon Silver 4214 (12 cores/24 threads)
RAM: 64GB DDR4 ECC
Storage: 2x 480GB SSD (RAID 1) + 4TB HDD
Bandwidth: 1Gbps unmetered

A virtualized instance running on a shared physical host. Common virtualization technologies:

• KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
• OpenVZ (older container-based tech)
• Xen (paravirtualization)

# Checking virtualization type on Linux
$ sudo dmidecode -s system-manufacturer
$ sudo virt-what

Elastic compute instances with API-driven provisioning. Key characteristics:

# AWS EC2 instance provisioning via CLI
aws ec2 run-instances \
    --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890 \
    --instance-type t3.xlarge \
    --key-name my-key-pair \
    --security-group-ids sg-903004f8 \
    --subnet-id subnet-6e7f829e

Benchmarking storage I/O across platforms:

# Disk benchmark command
$ fio --name=randwrite --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=32 \
--rw=randwrite --bs=4k --direct=1 --size=1G --numjobs=4 --runtime=60 \
--group_reporting

Different scaling approaches for each solution:

# Auto-scaling example for cloud servers
resources:
  web:
    type: aws_autoscaling_group
    properties:
      min_size: 2
      max_size: 10
      scaling_policies:
        - metric: CPUUtilization
          threshold: 70
          adjustment: +1

Sample monthly costs for comparable resources:

Decision matrix based on project requirements:

if workload == "consistent high performance":
    choose dedicated
elif workload == "variable with burst needs":
    choose cloud
elif budget_constraint and predictable_load:
    choose vps

At the hardware level, these server types differ fundamentally:

// Pseudocode representation of hardware allocation
if (serverType == DEDICATED) {
    allocate(entirePhysicalMachine);
} else if (serverType == VPS) {
    partition(physicalMachine, fixedVirtualSlices);
} else if (serverType == CLOUD) {
    dynamicPool(resourceCluster, onDemandAllocation);
}

Cloud servers offer elastic scaling unavailable in other models:

# AWS CLI example for vertical scaling
aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute \
    --instance-id i-1234567890abcdef0 \
    --instance-type "m5.large"

Virtual networking differs significantly:

• VPS: Shared physical NIC with VLAN isolation
• Cloud: Software-defined networking overlay
• Dedicated: Direct physical NIC access

Noisy neighbor problems vary by type:

// Benchmarking disk I/O isolation
fio --name=test --ioengine=libaio --rw=randread \
    --bs=4k --numjobs=16 --size=1G --runtime=60 \
    --time_based --group_reporting

API availability differs across platforms:

// Terraform snippet for cloud server provisioning
resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

Isolation levels impact security posture:

# Checking hypervisor isolation on VPS
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep hypervisor
lscpu | grep Virtualization