ERP and CRM System Hosting on Dedicated Servers

The case for hosting ERP and CRM on dedicated servers is straightforward: these systems cannot share resources with other workloads without performance degrading for everyone. When an accounting close process runs overnight queries against millions of transaction records, it needs the CPU and I/O it requires without competing with a marketing team’s analytics dashboard.

The On-Premise vs. SaaS ERP Decision

Where SaaS ERP Struggles

Salesforce, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and NetSuite have made cloud ERP the default for new deployments. For organizations that fit neatly into their standard data models and workflows, SaaS ERP is genuinely simpler to operate. For organizations that do not, the picture changes.

SaaS ERP limitations surface predictably in several situations: extensive customization requirements that the SaaS data model cannot accommodate, data residency requirements that the vendor cannot satisfy for specific regions, pricing that scales linearly with seats (100 users at $150/seat = $15,000/month), and integration requirements with legacy systems that need on-premise proximity for performance reasons.

Where Self-Hosted Dedicated Wins

Self-hosted ERP on dedicated hardware wins on cost predictability for stable-sized organizations, on customization depth, and on data ownership. A 100-seat Odoo ERP deployment on an InMotion Extreme Dedicated Server costs less per month in server fees regardless of user count, plus Odoo Enterprise licensing if required. That cost stays fixed as the organization grows its user base within that server’s capacity.

ERP Platform Hardware Requirements

SAP Business One

SAP Business One is designed for companies with 10-250 users. The recommended hardware scales with database size and concurrent users:

• Under 25 users: 32GB RAM, 8+ cores, SSD storage. InMotion Essential with 64GB DDR4 exceeds minimum requirements.
• 25-100 users: 64-128GB RAM, 12+ cores. InMotion Advanced or Elite covers this range.
• 100-250 users: 128GB+ RAM for HANA in-memory database. InMotion Extreme with 192GB DDR5 ECC RAM is the appropriate tier.

SAP HANA’s in-memory database model is specifically what makes the Extreme tier’s 192GB DDR5 ECC memory relevant here. HANA loads the entire database into memory for query processing. A 100GB SAP HANA database needs 100GB+ of RAM just for the database layer, before counting application server overhead.

Odoo ERP

Odoo is an open-source ERP platform with enterprise and community editions. The community edition is free; enterprise licensing adds advanced modules and official support. Hardware requirements are more flexible than SAP:

• Under 50 users: 8GB RAM, 4 cores minimum. InMotion Essential significantly exceeds this.
• 50-200 users: 32-64GB RAM recommended. InMotion Advanced is appropriate.
• 200+ users with multiple modules: 64-128GB RAM for PostgreSQL buffer pool plus application workers. Elite or Extreme tier.

Odoo runs on PostgreSQL. Following the PostgreSQL configuration guidelines from a database tuning perspective matters more for Odoo performance than raw hardware specs: a well-tuned PostgreSQL instance on 64GB RAM outperforms a default-configured instance on 128GB for Odoo’s query patterns.

ERPNext / Frappe

ERPNext, built on the Frappe framework with MariaDB, follows similar hardware scaling. The Frappe framework spawns multiple worker processes per site, so core count affects concurrent user throughput directly. An InMotion Hosting Advanced server handling 8-10 Frappe workers manages 100-200 concurrent ERP sessions without queuing.

CRM System Hosting

SuiteCRM and SugarCRM

SuiteCRM (the open-source fork of SugarCRM) is the most common Salesforce alternative for organizations that need CRM customization without the licensing cost. The database requirements are modest compared to ERP: a 50,000-contact CRM database occupies 5-20GB, and SuiteCRM’s PHP-based architecture runs comfortably on 16-32GB of RAM for 50-100 concurrent users.

The infrastructure differentiation point for CRM is storage I/O, not raw compute. Sales teams query contact records, filter opportunities, and generate reports simultaneously. NVMe-backed databases return these queries in milliseconds; SATA SSD backends introduce query latency that compounds across hundreds of daily user interactions.

Vtiger and HubSpot On-Premise Alternatives

Vtiger Open Source provides a self-hosted CRM with sales, marketing, and support modules. For organizations leaving HubSpot or Salesforce over cost or data control concerns, Vtiger on a dedicated server provides comparable functionality at infrastructure cost rather than per-seat cost.

The data migration path from Salesforce or HubSpot to a self-hosted CRM is the primary operational challenge, not the infrastructure. InMotion Solutions can assist with the initial server configuration; the data migration itself typically requires your CRM administrator and the target platform’s import tooling.

Database Performance for ERP Transaction Processing

ERP workloads are OLTP-heavy: hundreds of small reads and writes per user session rather than the large analytical queries that data warehouse workloads generate. This has specific implications for database configuration:

• InnoDB buffer pool (MySQL/MariaDB): Should hold the entire active transaction dataset in memory. For an Odoo deployment with a 20GB database, 25-30GB allocated to InnoDB buffer pool eliminates disk reads during normal operation.
• Connection pooling: ERP systems often open many short-lived database connections. ProxySQL (for MySQL) or PgBouncer (for PostgreSQL) reduce connection overhead.
• NVMe for transaction logs: InnoDB redo logs and PostgreSQL WAL write on every committed transaction. NVMe fsync latency of 0.05-0.1ms vs. SATA’s 0.5-1ms directly improves transaction throughput.
• ECC RAM: ERP financial data cannot tolerate silent bit-flip corruption. Extreme tier’s DDR5 ECC RAM is a non-negotiable requirement for production financial systems.

Compliance and Data Residency

Financial Data Sovereignty

ERP systems contain your company’s financial records, payroll data, vendor contracts, and purchase history. Several regulatory frameworks specify where this data can be stored:

• GDPR: Personal data of EU residents must remain within the EEA or transfer under approved mechanisms. InMotion’s Amsterdam data center satisfies EU data residency requirements.
• SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley): US public companies must maintain financial records for 7 years with audit trail integrity. Self-hosted ERP with immutable backup storage satisfies this.
• Industry-specific requirements: Healthcare organizations using ERP for procurement and billing must satisfy HIPAA requirements for any PHI that passes through the system.

SaaS ERP vendors publish compliance documentation, but the data residency is their data center, not yours. For organizations where data geography is a compliance requirement, self-hosted dedicated gives explicit control over where data lives.

Integration Architecture

ERP and CRM systems rarely operate in isolation. They integrate with payment processors, shipping carriers, e-commerce platforms, and business intelligence tools. Dedicated server hosting simplifies several integration patterns:

• API proximity: Integration middleware running on the same server as the ERP database has sub-millisecond API call latency rather than the network round-trip of a cloud-to-cloud integration.
• EDI processing: EDI file exchange with suppliers and customers requires specific network configurations that dedicated server environments accommodate more flexibly than SaaS platforms.
• Custom webhooks: Outbound webhooks to e-commerce platforms, shipping APIs, and custom internal tools run without per-call fees or rate limits imposed by SaaS integration platforms.

Getting Started

The InMotion Solutions team (included 1 hour/month with Premier Care on dedicated servers) can assist with initial ERP database configuration, PostgreSQL or MariaDB tuning for ERP workloads, and backup configuration for compliance documentation. The server infrastructure side is the straightforward part. The organizational change management and data migration are where most ERP projects spend the majority of their time.