Bare Metal Servers: Your Key to Flawless Streaming at Scale
During the 2024 Olympics, streamers delivered over 3,800 hours of live content to millions of concurrent viewers. The technical feat behind such a broadcast is immense, yet for the end-user, the expectation is simple: instant playback, zero buffering, and pristine resolution.
When buffering wheels spin, users churn. As streaming platforms migrate toward 4K, 8K, and immersive VR formats, the infrastructure required to deliver these experiences is reaching a critical inflection point. While virtualized cloud environments (IaaS) catalyzed the initial explosion of the streaming economy by offering elasticity, they are increasingly becoming an impediment to scale.
The technical realities of high-throughput video delivery—specifically regarding packet jitter, non-deterministic latency, and the computational density of transcoding—have exposed fundamental limitations in multi-tenant cloud architectures.
This article analyzes why bare metal infrastructure is re-emerging as the foundational substrate for large-scale video streaming, moving beyond superficial cost comparisons to explore the physics of data movement and the economics of scale.
The Technical Hurdles of Cloud Streaming
The public cloud offered an unprecedented low barrier to entry for the streaming economy. However, as platforms grow, the very nature of virtualized infrastructure creates significant technical and economic challenges.
Packet Jitter and Latency
In a multi-tenant cloud environment, your virtual CPU (vCPU) is a thread sharing a physical core with other customers. If another tenant—a “noisy neighbor”—initiates a demanding task, the hypervisor might pause your VM’s execution for milliseconds to serve them.
While negligible for many applications, this delay is devastating for live video. It introduces jitter, or variation in packet arrival times, which can lead to buffer underruns, stalling, and a degraded Quality of Experience (QoE). A bare metal server eliminates the hypervisor, giving the operating system direct, exclusive access to the CPU and network hardware for deterministic, low-jitter performance.
Computational Density of Transcoding
Transcoding—converting a high-bitrate source stream into multiple lower-bitrate versions for adaptive streaming—is an intensely CPU-heavy process. In a virtualized setting, you are limited to the general-purpose vCPUs offered by the provider.
This “t-shirt sizing” of instances restricts your ability to use specialized hardware like GPUs or ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) that are designed for maximum transcoding efficiency.
On bare metal, you have the freedom to select the precise silicon for the job, from high-core-count AMD EPYC processors to highly efficient NVIDIA L4 GPUs, optimizing for stream density and cost-per-stream.
Bandwidth Penalties
The most significant economic challenge is the “bandwidth penalty.” Hyperscale cloud providers often model their pricing with minimal fees for data ingress but exorbitant charges for egress. For a streaming service, where the volume of outbound data is massive, these egress fees can become financially crippling.
To deliver just 1 Petabyte (PB) of data per month, a mid-sized streaming workload, could cost upwards of $50,000 on a major cloud provider. This pricing model forces a re-evaluation of infrastructure economics for any serious streaming platform.
Why Bare Metal Servers are the Superior Choice
Hivelocity’s bare metal solutions directly address the shortcomings of virtualized environments, offering a powerful combination of performance, control, and cost-effectiveness.
Dedicated, Uncontended Performance
With a Hivelocity dedicated server, you get 100% of the system’s resources. There is no hypervisor overhead, no resource contention from noisy neighbors, and no unexpected performance degradation.
This single-tenant environment provides the raw, predictable power needed for consistent video encoding and low-latency delivery, ensuring your viewers get a smooth, buffer-free experience every time. Our hardware is your hardware, giving you full root access and control to customize the software and kernel settings to perfectly match your workload.
Consistent Throughput and Predictable Costs
Hivelocity’s bare metal servers offer a significant economic advantage, especially when it comes to bandwidth. Unlike the pay-per-GB model of hyperscalers that can lead to unpredictable and astronomical bills, we offer generous bandwidth allocations with our servers.
This model provides cost certainty, allowing you to scale your viewership without the fear of runaway egress fees. Our dedicated servers are often 3-5x cheaper than their virtualized equivalents at other cloud providers when comparing vCPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth.
Global Presence for Low-Latency Delivery
A superior viewer experience depends on minimizing latency. With a global footprint of over 40 data centers, Hivelocity allows you to deploy servers at the edge, closer to your audience.
This reduces round-trip times and ensures faster content delivery, which is critical for interactive and live streaming applications. Whether your viewers are in Dallas, Amsterdam, or Singapore, you can provision infrastructure nearby to serve them with speed and reliability.
Case Studies and Examples
The industry giants provide empirical evidence of this architectural shift.
Netflix and Open Connect
Netflix, responsible for a significant percentage of global internet traffic, does not deliver video bits from the public cloud. While they use AWS for their control plane (website, recommendations, billing), the actual video delivery happens via Open Connect.
Open Connect is a proprietary CDN built on custom bare metal appliances installed directly in ISP data centers. By bypassing the public internet backbone and eliminating cloud egress fees, Netflix created a private delivery network that is economically sustainable and technically superior.
The Shift Across the Industry
This trend is not unique to Netflix. Platforms like Twitch (despite being owned by Amazon) maintain a massive footprint of bare metal Points of Presence (PoPs) for video ingest and distribution. They recognize that the specific requirements of low-latency, high-throughput live video are best served by dedicated hardware optimized for that specific purpose.
Similarly, companies like Ceeblue and Vindral have leveraged bare metal providers to achieve sub-second latency for interactive streaming, proving that deterministic hardware is a prerequisite for real-time engagement.
Hivelocity: Your Partner in Streaming Infrastructure
While many providers offer bare metal, Hivelocity combines enterprise-grade hardware with the flexibility and support that streaming platforms need to thrive.
Cloud-Native Flexibility: Our modern infrastructure can be provisioned rapidly—often in as little as 7 minutes—and managed via API. With our Terraform provider, you can adopt an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, treating your physical servers with the same agility as virtual machines.
Hybrid Architectures: We understand that the best solution often involves a hybrid approach. Use Hivelocity’s cost-effective bare metal for your baseline transcoding and delivery workloads, while leveraging cloud providers for bursting capacity during peak events. Our robust network and global locations make it easy to build a seamless hybrid infrastructure.
Unmatched Support: Our U.S.-based support team is available 24/7 by phone, chat, and ticket. With an NPS score over 81, we pride ourselves on being a true partner, helping you design, deploy, and manage an infrastructure solution that meets your specific streaming needs.
Build the Future of Your Streaming Platform
The trajectory of streaming infrastructure is clear. To deliver the high-quality, low-latency experiences that modern audiences demand, a move toward dedicated hardware is not just an option—it’s a necessity. Bare metal servers provide the raw performance, network consistency, and economic advantages that virtualized clouds cannot match at scale.
By partnering with Hivelocity, you gain access to a powerful platform built for the future of streaming. Get the performance of bare metal, the flexibility of the cloud, and the support of a team dedicated to your success.
Ready to optimize your streaming experience? Explore our bare metal solutions to find the dedicated power your infrastructure needs.
