Dedicated servers can provide control and predictable resources, but they also create operational responsibility. The architecture should be driven by workload and business risk.
A dedicated server gives one customer control of physical server resources rather than sharing the underlying machine with unrelated tenants. It can host one large application or several workloads depending on the design.
Not automatically. Performance depends on CPU, memory, storage, network, application design, database behaviour and caching. Dedicated hardware can provide predictable performance, while cloud platforms can provide flexibility and easier scaling.
Isolation can reduce some shared-platform risks, but a poorly patched or exposed dedicated server can still be compromised. Security depends on configuration, access control, updates, monitoring, backups, network protection and application quality.
That must be agreed. Unmanaged dedicated hosting may provide hardware and network only, leaving your team responsible for the OS and applications. Managed hosting should define patching, monitoring, backup, response and escalation duties.
If they host public websites or APIs, a WAF can still be valuable. Dedicated hardware does not protect the application from malicious HTTP requests, bots or exploitation attempts.
High availability usually means eliminating more than one single point of failure: multiple application nodes, resilient load balancing, replicated data, redundant network paths, monitoring and tested failover. Merely owning two servers is not a resilience design.
Once you are designing multi-node applications, database replication, load balancing, multiple data centres, BGP, DDoS resilience or complex failure domains, the work crosses into infrastructure architecture. For large cluster and resilience projects, 39Design can refer the engagement to Matthew Southgate for specialist architecture.