Choosing Between Renting Or Buying Servers: What’s Best For Business

Renting a server involves contacting the server provider and letting them know your cloud computing needs, whereas buying a server involves procurement of the entire physical hardware and software itself. Both offer distinct benefits to their owners while providing them with a swift and reliable cloud computing environment for their businesses. 

In this comprehensive blog post, choosing between renting or buying servers, we will explore how they differ and which businesses are suitable for leveraging the benefits of these two deployment models. 

A] Comparing The Considerations of Renting vs Buying a Server

1. Cost-Effectiveness

The rented server offers a pay-as-you-go model where you just need to pay for a selected cloud computing plan, and you are good to go. It doesn’t require buying additional hardware and software to get cloud computing services. With rented servers, businesses don’t have to hire additional IT staff to look after the server. In conclusion, the rented server comes on top among its companion deployment models in terms of cost-effectiveness. 

When comparing the cost of buying vs renting servers, buying or private servers are known to be the most expensive cloud deployment model due to their computing infrastructure procurement needs. In addition, businesses have to hire separate IT staff to take care of server maintenance needs. 

2. Customisation & Control

Rented servers excel at offering an extended level of customisation and control. With a rented server, you can customise every aspect of computing resources, such as RAM, storage, and CPU, and choose operating systems according to your requirements. Moreover, you can implement strict access control over your data, restricting users from accessing any kind of data that you don’t want them to. 

On the other hand, buying servers poses a variety of intricacies when it comes to customisation. To customise or extend cloud computing needs, businesses have to buy additional computing hardware, which eventually costs them. However, private servers offer excellent control over their servers and how their data is being used.

3. Reliability & Scalability

When it comes to fulfilling the needs of rising computing demands or requirements of handling fluctuating demands, rented servers are designed to excel in even that. Businesses can seamlessly upgrade or downgrade their server resource by contacting their cloud computing solution provider. Other than that, a Rented server, especially a dedicated cloud server, is deployed with robust security measures, making it nearly impossible to hack or breach it. 

When comparing cloud server rental vs buying, buying servers is a bit difficult to scale. Due to its need to procure every aspect of hardware to scale, it poses difficulty and requires heavy investments. However, they excel in terms of reliability as they are provisioned privately just like dedicated cloud servers on the provider’s cloud infrastructure. 

4. Short & Long Term Need Fulfillment

Whether you are a small, medium, or large business owner, you cannot deny the need for a server with built-in properties to fulfill your short and long-term goals. Absolute Cloud’s highly flexible dedicated cloud server, a form of rented server, is designed to fulfill the entire needs of businesses, whether it is short-term or long-term.

Private servers, on the other hand, don’t match the flexibility that rented servers provide to businesses. Businesses must decide their needs beforehand and buy computing hardware and associated equipment based on their overall needs. They don’t have options to switch their server resources based on their short and long-term needs. 

5. Maintenance and Support

Regarding maintenance and support, rented servers excel in providing comprehensive support and regular maintenance without user intervention. Going one step further, Absolute Cloud’s dedicated cloud server offers round-the-clock support by assigning clients a dedicated relationship manager. They have a 5-minute response time, and they claim to respond 24/7 within five minutes and acknowledge your IT concerns. Additionally, rented servers offer automatic 7-day image retention backups, providing businesses with peace of mind during unexpected situations.

On the other hand, buying servers is like buying self-owned servers, where maintenance and support are looked after by the business itself. Unlike dedicated cloud servers, if they encounter technical or server glitches, they have to manage and resolve them independently. It demands investments, time, and dedicated IT support engineers, which adds substantially to costs. 

6. Asset Depreciation

With a rented dedicated cloud server, you don’t own the server’s physical infrastructure instead, you get the required cloud computing resources on rent. It mitigates any possibility of depreciation of physical computing assets as you do not own these physical resources. 

Whereas, Private servers involve business-owned physical server assets that depreciate in time due to technology changes and redundancy. Eventually, it inhibits businesses from harnessing the true value of their investments. 

7. Technology Upgrades

Rented dedicated servers are regulated and maintained by the Absolute Cloud, ensuring you receive state-of-the-art technology and well-equipped server resources. They upgrade their physical and virtual resources whenever new technologies and updates arrive. 

As you know, buying servers are privately owned servers which ultimately prevents them from tasting the benefits of the latest technologies and updates. To do so, they will have to replace multiple physical and software setups, which eventually cost while posing redundancy over old parts. 

8. Datacenter Features and Location

Rented servers offer additional benefits that come with being part of a high-quality datacenter. Absolute Cloud’s servers are hosted in state-of-the-art data centers like Netmagic and NTT Data, which include:

• Infrastructure worth ₹800 crores.
• Five internet connections for uninterrupted service.
• Two-day power failover protection.
• Advanced firewalls for unparalleled security.

These features ensure a level of reliability and performance that private servers cannot match.

9. Environmental Impact 

Rented dedicated servers are known for benefiting the environment, as they don’t generate as much e-waste as private servers. Absolute Cloud’s IT infrastructure is equipped with energy-efficient and renewable energy-powered hardware that helps produce a minimal carbon footprint and plays a significant role in environmental sustainability. 

Private servers are composed of multiple server hardware, requiring extensive energy to run them. If any business intends to revamp its private server to reduce its carbon footprint, it will have to change its IT hardware with energy-efficient machines, which obviously require extensive investment. 

10. Multi-Location Accessibility

If your business requires a centralised server accessible across multiple locations or remote offices, renting cloud servers is the ideal solution. Private servers struggle to support such environments efficiently without significant costs. Cloud servers excel in ensuring seamless access anywhere, making them indispensable for businesses with distributed teams.

B] Which Type Of Businesses Benefit From Renting vs. Purchasing?

1. Renting vs. Buying Servers for Business

A rented dedicated server would be the best fit when you are looking for a server that provides flexibility and customisability without investing in expensive hardware equipment. It provides high flexibility and customisation to fulfill your changing demands cost-effectively. 

2. Renting vs. Owning Servers for Enterprises

Private or buying servers may be suitable for enterprises due to their full resource control. However, the rented dedicated server offers the same facility without needing to procure hardware and software separately. In addition, enterprises dealing with media or AI applications can effortlessly switch to GPU cloud servers to power their GPU-extensive applications. Meanwhile, if you don’t know about cloud-based GPU and on-premise GPU, go through Cloud-Based GPU Vs. On-Premise GPU guide to comprehend it. 

3. Renting Servers vs Buying for Startups

Setting up a private server for a startup would require extensive investment and separate maintenance and update costs. On the other hand, rented dedicated servers offer a pay-and-use model with quick deployment. It lets the startups focus on their business growth by saving tons of investments and time while giving them private server-like benefits and facilities.

Conclusion

Buying and rented servers are both proficient in powering businesses of any size. So far, we have observed that rented servers have been gaining an edge over private servers recurrently due to their features and benefits. Therefore, if you want to save money while enjoying the advantages of a private server, opting for a rented dedicated server would be a wise choice.

Absolute Cloud is a renowned provider of dedicated servers in India, offering cloud services to many industry leaders. Contact us today and take your business to the cloud.