Bare metal servers can help adtech teams improve performance consistency and lower infrastructure costs for demanding production workloads.
DSPs, SSPs, and exchanges need to process high volumes of bid requests within strict response deadlines while keeping infrastructure costs in check.
Late responses can mean missed auction opportunities, while the cost of processing requests and moving data affects the economics of operating at scale. These pressures make bare metal worth evaluating for workloads with sustained capacity requirements.
In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits and tradeoffs of bare metal for adtech, how it compares to cloud infrastructure, and what to consider when choosing a provider.
Understanding the demands of adtech infrastructure
Adtech platforms handle workloads ranging from real-time bidding (RTB) and ad serving to event ingestion and campaign analytics. At scale, all of these workloads can all place heavy demands on your infrastructure’s compute, storage, and networking resources.
Additionally, infrastructure costs can be a key concern for growing adtech platforms. Bid requests consume resources even when they generate no revenue, and event data accumulates continuously.
For both performance and cost reasons, bare metal can be an attractive option for adtech teams searching for an infrastructure solution.
Benefits of bare metal for adtech
Bare metal servers provide dedicated physical hardware for your workloads. Your team has access to the server’s full resources and can run applications directly on the operating system or deploy its own virtualization layer.
By comparison, standard cloud virtual machines share an underlying physical host with other customers. A hypervisor allocates hardware resources to each VM, while the provider manages the physical infrastructure.
For adtech teams, dedicated hardware can offer advantages in performance consistency, cost at sustained utilization, and infrastructure control.
1. Fewer potential sources of variability
When it comes to real-time bidding, response times at the slow end of the distribution matter. A bidder may have a low average latency but still miss auction deadlines when a small percentage of requests take too long. Teams monitor tail latency, often measured at the 95th or 99th percentile, to understand this risk.
Bare metal removes contention from other tenants sharing the physical host. Running applications directly on the operating system also removes the hypervisor layer, giving teams more direct control over resource allocation.
These advantages can help keep bid processing times more consistent under load. Application behavior, network latency, and capacity planning still matter, but dedicated hardware removes one potential source of unpredictable performance.
2. Favorable costs at scale
Adtech platforms can require substantial baseline capacity to process bid requests, serve ads, and ingest events around the clock. When that demand is sustained, dedicated servers can offer a lower cost per request or event than comparable cloud capacity.
Bare metal pricing is typically offered on a fixed monthly or hourly basis, making compute costs predictable. Teams that consistently use the available resources can spread that cost across a high volume of requests.
Data transfer can also become a significant expense, showing up on the infrastructure bill as egress fees. Bare metal providers offering unmetered bandwidth or generous transfer allowances can reduce these costs and make them easier to forecast.
Read our full guide to reducing adtech infrastructure costs to learn how bare metal can help keep cloud spending under control as your platform grows.
3. Greater control of your infrastructure
Cloud instance types define the combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking available to your workloads. Teams can tune within the VM, but the provider controls the physical host and hypervisor.
Bare metal gives teams more control over hardware selection and configuration. For a bidding service, that might mean choosing CPUs for per-core performance and tuning CPU affinity to keep latency-sensitive processes on specific cores. For event ingestion or analytics, it could mean configuring local NVMe storage around write throughput and dataset size.
This flexibility lets teams build and tune infrastructure around their workload requirements.
How to choose between cloud and bare metal for adtech platforms
The right infrastructure model depends on your workload’s capacity requirements, performance targets, and operational needs. Cloud offers flexibility, while bare metal can provide predictable dedicated capacity for sustained production workloads.
The choice can be made workload by workload. A platform might run bidding services on bare metal while keeping development environments, burst capacity, or managed services in the cloud.
When to choose cloud
Cloud is a strong fit for teams that need to start small, scale capacity quickly, or experiment with workloads whose requirements are still uncertain. Managed services offered by cloud providers like Amazon Web Services can also reduce the work involved in operating databases, queues, and data pipelines.
As an example, an adtech team testing a new bidding model may need temporary capacity to replay historical bid requests and evaluate results. In this case, cloud instances let the team provision resources for the test and release them afterward, without reserving dedicated servers for occasional use.
When to choose bare metal
Bare metal servers can be a better choice for adtech workloads whose performance requirements or scale have made cloud infrastructure less practical or economical. These tend to be steady, resource-intensive, or always-on production workloads where predictable baseline capacity is needed.
Teams looking to reduce performance variability, lower their infrastructure bill, or gain more control over their infrastructure may choose to migrate these workloads to bare metal servers.
For example, a DSP processing a sustained volume of bid requests around the clock could use dedicated servers for its bidding services. Consistent utilization can make dedicated capacity more economical, while control over hardware and resource allocation helps teams tune performance around auction response deadlines.
How to choose a bare metal provider for adtech
For adtech teams, an infrastructure decision doesn’t end with comparing cloud and bare metal. Once you have identified bare metal as a solution, the next step is to determine the right deployment model for your needs.
Purchasing hardware to deploy on-premises or in a colocation data center is one option. However, for teams that want the benefits of bare metal with less upfront investment or responsibility for physical hardware, leasing servers from a bare metal as a service provider can be more attractive.
Under this model, the provider procures, racks, and maintains the hardware, while your team manages the operating system and software stack. Servers can be provisioned remotely through an online portal or programmatically through APIs, CLIs, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
Providers vary in their available specifications, service model, and pricing. For adtech teams aiming to choose the best bare metal server provider, careful evaluation should include criteria like:
Hardware fit: Match CPU performance, memory, and storage to the workload. Benchmark bidding services against response-time targets and analytics systems against ingestion and query requirements.
Network connectivity and location: Test latency to exchange endpoints, supply partners, and services your applications depend on. Geographic proximity alone does not guarantee a good network path.
Bandwidth terms: Confirm port speeds, included transfer, overage charges, and any restrictions on unmetered plans.
Capacity availability: Verify that suitable configurations are available in your required regions. Discuss expansion lead times and capacity commitments if growth is anticipated.
Provisioning and automation: Evaluate APIs, Terraform support, custom images, and remote console access against your deployment and recovery workflows.
Reliability and support: Review network redundancy, support coverage, and hardware replacement procedures. Ensure your architecture can maintain service while a failed server is repaired or replaced.
Bare metal for adtech with Rackdog
Rackdog provides dedicated servers with enterprise-grade hardware, high-capacity networking, and unmetered bandwidth for demanding adtech workloads. Global deployment locations and API and Terraform provisioning help teams build and manage capacity around their performance and operational requirements.
Whether you’re evaluating infrastructure for bidding, ad serving, or data processing, our team can help you identify suitable hardware, locations, and bandwidth options.
Create an account to start deploying your first server, or get in touch with our team of infrastructure experts to explore a bare metal solution that’s right for you.