What is the difference between instances allocated on dedicated hosts and regular cloud servers?

The key difference between instances allocated on dedicated hosts and regular cloud servers lies in resource isolation and physical hardware control.

Regular Cloud Servers (Shared Hosting):
These instances run on shared physical hardware, where multiple customers' virtual machines (VMs) share the same underlying server resources. While virtualization ensures isolation at the software level, there is no guarantee of exclusive access to the physical CPU, memory, or storage. This model is cost-effective and suitable for workloads that don’t require strict hardware control.

Instances on Dedicated Hosts:
Dedicated hosts provide exclusive access to an entire physical server, ensuring that no other customers' workloads share the same hardware. This is ideal for scenarios requiring:

• Compliance: Meeting regulatory requirements for physical isolation (e.g., financial or healthcare data).
• License Optimization: Some software licenses are tied to physical hardware (e.g., Oracle licenses).
• Performance Consistency: Avoiding "noisy neighbor" effects by eliminating resource contention.

Example:
A financial institution processing sensitive transactions may choose dedicated hosts to ensure compliance with data isolation standards. In contrast, a startup running a web application with variable traffic might opt for regular cloud servers for scalability and cost efficiency.

For dedicated host solutions, Tencent Cloud offers BlackStone Dedicated Hosts, providing physical server isolation with flexible instance deployment options.