While bare metal servers and dedicated servers are often used interchangeably, their meanings can vary slightly depending on the context. In essence, both terms, generally, denote physical servers dedicated to a single customer, rather than being shared among multiple users.
In contrast to other types of hosting, such as Shared Hosting or VPS Hosting, where users share the physical server, bare metal and dedicated servers are exclusively dedicated to a single user.
A bare metal server falls under the category of dedicated servers. The term dedicated server generally encompasses a physical server exclusively allocated to a single customer or user as opposed to being shared among multiple users. With a dedicated server, the customer enjoys complete control and access to the server’s resources.
In most technical discussions, bare metal is used to emphasize the absence of a hypervisor or shared virtualization layer while dedicated server describes exclusive hardware access regardless of how it is managed.