Top 14 Bare Metal Cloud Providers [2025]

The technological landscape is rapidly evolving, with the bare metal cloud market standing out as one of the most promising domains. Driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), along with the digital transformation of industries like manufacturing, the demand for high-performance, secure, and scalable hosting solutions has surged. From an estimated market size of $8.5 billion in 2023, it is projected to skyrocket to $19.1 billion by 2028, with an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.4%.

This shift reflects the growing need for cloud solutions that combine the advantages of traditional dedicated servers with the agility and flexibility of modern cloud infrastructure. Bare metal cloud servers cater to organizations that demand the highest level of performance, security, and control—qualities that are becoming increasingly vital in handling latency-sensitive workloads.

In today’s data-driven era, where applications like blockchain, IoT, financial modeling, and data science thrive, traditional virtualized environments often fall short in delivering the required reliability and speed. Bare metal servers fill this gap by offering exclusive access to physical hardware, ensuring no resource sharing and providing unparalleled customization and performance.

This article explores the intricacies of bare metal cloud technology, its key features, and its transformative impact across industries. Additionally, it highlights the leading bare metal cloud providers for both small businesses (SMBs) and enterprises, offering insights into their services, pricing, and suitability. Whether you’re a startup looking for cost-effective scalability or an enterprise needing high-end computing power, this guide will help you navigate the competitive landscape of bare metal cloud solutions.

Top Bare Metal Cloud Providers in 2024 [A Recap]

The bare metal cloud industry continues to gain traction across a wide array of sectors, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), manufacturing, and mobile app development. As industries increasingly demand high-performance, scalable, and secure infrastructure solutions, bare metal cloud providers have risen to meet these needs.

According to the Research and Markets Bare Metal Cloud Report, 16 leading providers have been identified as industry frontrunners. This assessment is grounded in both primary research—such as detailed interviews with experts and user surveys—and secondary research, which includes analysis of company websites, service portfolios, and financial data.

Evaluation Criteria for Industry Leaders

The report assessed providers using a rigorous framework to identify their strengths and market positioning. The key factors included:

1. Size and Scale: Reflecting the provider’s ability to offer robust and reliable infrastructure across multiple regions.
2. Service Breadth: A diverse range of offerings to cater to varying business needs, from small-scale operations to enterprise-level requirements.
3. Technological Capabilities: Advanced automation, orchestration, and networking technologies were highlighted as essential for competitive service delivery.
4. Market Share and Revenue: Financial metrics indicating a strong foothold in the industry.
5. Global Customer Reach: A wide customer base showcasing the provider’s reliability and scalability across geographies.
6. Innovation: A focus on continuous improvement and cutting-edge features, ensuring a competitive advantage.
7. Flexible Pricing Models: Options ranging from subscription-based plans to fixed pricing, catering to businesses with varying budgets and operational demands.

Categorization of Providers

To address diverse business needs, the 16 providers were segmented into two main categories:

• Large-Scale Enterprises: These providers prioritize robustness, offering scalable and secure solutions to handle heavy workloads, ensuring high availability and seamless integration.
• Small-to-Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs): These providers focus on cost-effective and flexible solutions, helping smaller organizations harness the power of bare metal infrastructure without overshooting budgets.

Why This Matters

The segmentation and evaluation criteria provide clarity for organizations looking to adopt or expand their bare metal cloud strategies. Whether a business requires a highly reliable infrastructure for latency-sensitive applications like IoT and blockchain or a flexible, budget-friendly solution for growth, this report serves as a valuable guide to identifying the most suitable providers in 2024.

8 Top bare metal cloud providers: SMBs

We analyzed the list of small and medium-sized business (SMB) bare metal cloud providers in the report, based on factors like competitive pricing, flexibility, regional expertise, and how they can cater to smaller enterprises with their dedicated bare metal cloud server solutions. Here is a list of top bare metal cloud providers in the SMB category, in no particular order.

#1. Cherry Servers (LT)

Overview: Cherry Servers is a Lithuania-based European bare metal cloud provider that offers a wide range of servers for developers and SMBs with light, moderate, and heavy workloads. It emphasizes a flexible and fully customizable configuration for specific workload needs. The primary servers include 4 CPU cores, 3.5 GHz processing power, 32 GB memory, and DDoS protection.

Overall, Cherry Servers is a bare metal cloud provider suitable for any audience requiring a dedicated, high-performance server with the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing.

Pros & cons: Prebuilt servers & customizable options are available, you can add more storage capacity (alter most features like RAM, storage, and hardware). Complete automation for server resource management and scalable storage with free backups. DevOps integrations. Top-notch friendly and free 24/7 technical support.

Pricing: Affordable, lightweight plan starts at $107 monthly.

Best for: Individuals and organizations requiring powerful and highly customizable bare metal cloud infrastructure. Developers and DevOps teams, SMBs, data science professionals, AI and machine learning, gaming, media, and online retailers and e-commerce platforms.

2. OVHcloud (FR)

Overview: OVHcloud is a leading European bare metal cloud provider headquartered in France offering cost-effective dedicated servers and private cloud solutions. OVHcloud provides bare metal servers, hybrid and public cloud solutions, and hosted private cloud to SMBs.

Pros & cons: Manages 40 data centers in 4 continents, with self-manufactured servers and fiber-optic network for maximum efficiency. Customized solutions for enterprise-level projects, big data, AI, and machine learning. Some factors, like the absence of a free website migration service and no automatic backups, are a con; however, generally, only a few drawbacks are experienced in OVHcloud usage.

Pricing: Rise Dedicated Servers start at around $52/month with memory up to 128GB.

Best for: Caters to a wide audience, such as large corporations and established businesses, universities, research labs, educational organizations, security companies, and cybersecurity professionals, or for any business-critical application, development projects, or specialized workloads.

3. DigitalOcean (US)

Overview: DigitalOcean is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider headquartered in New York City, operating 15 globally distributed data centers actively serving developers, startups, and SMBs. Enhances growth with predictable cloud costs, good price-to-performance ratio. Cloudways offers fully managed cloud hosting, utilizing DigitalOcean Droplets.

Pros & cons: Offers virtual and bare metal droplet instances with monthly subscriptions. Simplifies development with easy-to-use tools, dedicated support, and faster response times. A globally distributed platform that ensures superior customer experience with minimal downtime and intuitive products.

Pricing: Bare Metal Cloud pricing in the US typically starts at around $150/month for its base model. Extra costs for resources like CPU, RAM, and storage may vary based on usage and location.

Best for: App deployment among tech-savvy teams. Developers can also appreciate its user-friendly interface, whereas business owners can take advantage of its predictable pricing, ease of usage, and development environments.

4. Joyent (US)

Overview: Based in the US, Joyent is considered an early innovator in bare metal cloud, offering containers and virtual networking on dedicated servers. Provides core computing, storage, networking, and security globally, in line with several major cloud providers, and services like data analytics, computing, microservices, database, and storage services.

Utilizing open source technology for more than 18 years, championed microservices, containers, and multi-cloud architectures and has partnered with Samsung to develop a next-generation private cloud for scalable applications.

Pros & cons: Provides cloud management tools, including identity & access management, GUI & API management, and usage reports.

Pricing: Their pricing typically starts at around $500 per month for their base configuration.

Best for: Joyent’s cloud services are sought after by enterprise-level clients and high-performance computing users. Its robust infrastructure makes it suitable for mission-critical workloads, large-scale applications, and data-intensive operations utilized by developers worldwide.

5. HPE (US)

Overview: HPE, or Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texa. It offers Bare Metal Cloud as a service solution for enterprise-grade automation and scalability. HPE GreenLake provides a cloud experience for apps and data across all clouds, with complete visibility and control, in a single operating model.

The bare metal cloud market-leading HPE GreenLake portfolio features modular building blocks for enabling workload, including a stack of infrastructure, software, and services.

Pros & cons: Provides solutions for workloads like Data Protection, Big Data, Private cloud, Machine learning, etc. HPE also delivers services for managing end-to-end hybrid cloud environments, simplifying complex migration processes.

Pricing: HPE’s entry-level server solutions start at around $100 per month for enterprise-grade infrastructure with prices exceeding several thousand dollars monthly.

Best for: HPE’s solutions are primarily consumed by enterprise-level clients in the US. It also caters to finance, healthcare, government, and telecommunications industries.

6. Scaleway (FR)

Overview: Scaleway, a French company, specializes in ARM-based servers and object storage services. It offers a range of Bare Metal Cloud solutions, including online servers and comprehensive current Bare Metal offerings.

Pros & cons: Dedibox offers more than 100 hardware configurations dedicated to performance with full server control, premium network access, and infrastructure options. Elastic Metal provides seamless hybrid flexibility, predictable performance, and flexible pricing options. Apple Silicon offers lightning-fast CI-CD for iOS and macOS, ultra-secure data centers in France, and a fully native macOS Monterey 13 experience.

Pricing: Bare metal cloud server plans start at a minimum of €9.99/month for 4 GB RAM.

Best for: Scaleway’s Bare Metal Cloud (BMC) solutions are tailored to meet the needs of a diverse range of users, including startups, developers, SMBs, and businesses.

7. PhoenixNAP (US)

Overview: PhoenixNAP is a US-based cloud and data center provider that offers bare metal cloud hosting, colocation, and other managed services. The company specializes in designing and developing world-class bare metal clouds that focus on performance, security, reliability, and availability. Key features include colocation facilities with redundant systems, high-density deployments, and flexibility in service options.

Pros & cons: Dedicated servers guarantee 100% uptime, extensive server lineup, connectivity, and 24x7x365 live support. Network services offer high-bandwidth connectivity, enterprise-grade security, and exceptional performance. Tailor-made business solutions that emphasize efficiency, affordability, and protection. Operates data centers across North America, providing cutting-edge computing technology with a pay-per-use payment model, which could be considered an advantage or disadvantage depending on the usage requirements.

Pricing: The minimum pricing for a Single CPU Instance plan starts at $89/month for 64 GB RAM.

Best for: PhoenixNAP is an ideal solution for disaster recovery in global locations because it provides the required backup and restoration solutions. It caters to a diverse range of clients, including small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprises, developers, and IT professionals. It also serves industries such as finance, healthcare, technology, and e-commerce.

8. Hetzner (DE)

Overview: Hetzner is a well-known German company that offers competitive prices on bare metal servers, VMs, and storage solutions. Their bare metal cloud features include a load balancer, primary IPs, networks, firewalls, performance monitoring, documentation & API access, snapshots, backups, DDoS protection, traffic management, and data protection.

Pros & cons: They have dedicated vCPU plans that provide low latencies, which is ideal for sustained high CPU and network use in business-critical applications. Block Storage Volumes offer flexible and scalable SSD-based storage (up to 10TB expandable) & support up to 16 Volumes per cloud server. On the other hand, few users have, at times, experienced hardware failures compared to other BMC providers.

Pricing: Their minimum price for a Dedicated vCPU plan starts at €11.99/month for 8 GB RAM. Their cloud servers boast the best price-performance ratio with unshared power for production workloads.

Best for: Startups, SMBs, developers, and enterprises absorb Hetzner’s services to their total. It appeals to those seeking reliable and cost-effective hosting solutions for websites, applications, and databases.

Also Read | Top 10 U.S. Data Center Markets and Their Exploding Demand

6 Largest bare metal cloud providers: Enterprises

We evaluated bare metal cloud enterprises, blending qualitative and quantitative research against specific predefined criteria. These top 8 bare metal cloud enterprises, in no particular order, emerged because of their significant revenues, large cloud infrastructure, diverse portfolio for bare metal services, global market leadership, and technically advanced, innovative approaches.

1. IBM (US)

Overview: IBM is a major BMC market leader known for its extensive global data center presence and automation tools. IBM acquired SoftLayer in the year 2013, expanding its capabilities in bare-metal servers, now operating over 60 IBM Cloud data centers across 19 countries.

Pros & cons: IMB offers customizable bare-metal servers with over 11 million configurations available, and payment options include hourly, monthly, or reserved capacity pricing. It definitely is on the costlier side when it comes to BMC providers. Also, other users have observed that reloading the OS takes a long time.

Pricing: Classic Plan for IBM Bare Metal Server starts at almost $2625 per month.

Best for: IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers are single-tenant, dedicated servers that can be deployed and managed as cloud services. They are available in classic or VPC deployment models and cater to diverse customers, including enterprises, startups, developers, and businesses in finance, healthcare, research, and technology industries with demanding computational needs.

2. Oracle (US)

Overview: Oracle offers customized bare-metal server configurations offering specific workloads through its Bare Metal Instances. It includes ‘Standard’ instance configuration for various workloads, balancing CPU cores, memory, and network resources.

Pros & cons: Oracle supports high core counts, high bandwidth applications, and large memory, scaling up to 1.92 billion, 2.3 TB of RAM, and 1 PB of block storage. Customers experience significant performance improvements compared to other public clouds and on-premises data centers. However, factors like implementation complexity, high costs, limited customization, and dependence on the vendor are challenges faced while utilizing Oracle BMC.

Pricing: The estimated monthly cost for Compute – Bare Metal Instances is almost $2,468.

Best for: The target audience for Oracle Bare metal cloud services includes large corporations with complex IT requirements, software developers and DevOps teams, innovative startups, e-commerce platforms, banks, insurance companies, and other organizations with demanding computational needs.

3. AWS (US)

Overview: AWS is a significant player in cloud computing, providing bare metal and virtual services for flexibility and performance. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) enables the creation and management of cloud computing resources. While EC2 instances are typically virtual, Amazon offers numerous bare metal options.

Pros & cons: Bare metal instances are suitable for demanding workloads like video encoding, scientific modeling, and multiplayer gaming, requiring direct access to physical resources. Although AWS offers good uptime services, it is not infallible. It does go down like most other providers.

Pricing: The monthly cost for Compute – Bare Metal Instances on AWS is $1500.

Best for: Customers that could benefit from AWS Bare Metal Cloud include enterprise clients, corporations with demanding workloads, big data and analytics companies, game developers, banks, insurance companies, fintech startups, universities, research labs, and scientific organizations can also utilize AWS Bare Metal Cloud for running data-intensive research simulations, scientific computing, and high-performance computing tasks.

4. Lumen (US)

Overview: Lumen Edge Bare Metal (formerly known as CenturyLink) is a US-based computing solutions company that leverages an extensive fiber network and manages both dedicated servers and virtual environments for clients. It offers access to a distributed edge network of high-capacity bare metal cloud servers, reducing latency for real-time data processing and storage.

Pros & cons: Lumen has customizable options that allow you to choose the OS, configuration, and pricing model that best suits your business needs, ensuring performance and cost control. Secure, single-tenancy dedicated servers protect data with user-defined firewall policies, customer encryption, and adjustable access across features. But sometimes, the interface can be a little slow.

Pricing: Lumen offers dynamic estimates before deployment, with convenient monthly or pay-as-you-go models. The estimated starting price for 96 GB of RAM is $360 per month.

Best for: Lumen’s Bare Metal Cloud (BMC) serves a variety of target audiences, including large corporations and innovative startups, software developers and DevOps teams, companies in the media and entertainment sector, and healthcare organizations utilizing BMC for storing and analyzing data securely.

5. Rackspace (US)

Overview: Rackspace Technology specializes in fully managed dedicated servers with professional support offerings. Their dedicated bare metal servers ensure maximum uptime, visibility, security, and control for custom needs. Cloud experts collaborate to design and build a secure, customized bare metal hosting platform dedicated solely to each client’s unique business requirements.

Pros & cons: Rackspace offers best-in-class uptime, high performance, and flexible support options tailored to specific needs. Key features include customizable infrastructure, dedicated vendor partnerships, on-demand data centers, always-on connectivity, professional and managed services, and data freedom.

On the other hand, factors like the high cost of hosting, homogenous hardware environment, lack of options for external instance storage, and limited features in their cloud environment could be challenging to deal with in Rackspace.

Pricing: Rackspace’s Bare Metal Cloud pricing typically starts at around $500 to $1000 per month for basic configurations.

Best for: Rackspace’s Bare Metal Cloud can be utilized by schools, colleges, and universities, companies offering software solutions, marketing and advertising agencies, manufacturing companies, and large & small enterprises.

6. Microsoft Azure (US)

Overview: Microsoft Azure offers bare metal VMs and dedicated host options for specialized workloads via Azure infrastructure services. It provides high-performance storage options such as NFS, iSCSI, and Fiber Channel, which are shareable across BareMetal instances for features like scale-out clusters. Offers function-specific virtual LANs (VLANs) in an isolated environment with certified hardware for specialized workloads.

Pros & cons: Redundant power, supplies, NICs, TORs, ports, WANs, and management, with hot spares for replacement and customer-coordinated maintenance windows. Non-hypervisor BareMetal instances ensure single-tenant ownership with low latency (0.35 ms) between Azure-hosted application VMs and Bare Metal instances. Provides application-aware snapshots, archives, mirroring, and cloning.

Contrarily, factors like Azure requiring platform expertise to navigate its extensive suite of services and configurations can be complex, requiring a significant investment in training, which could be challenging during operation.

Pricing: The minimum price starts at $2,142.68/month for 144 GiB RAM.

Best for: Enterprises – industries benefiting from Microsoft’s Azure include telecom companies, manufacturers, transportation firms, energy companies, enterprises, and government agencies utilizing BMC for secure data management and infrastructure modernization.

Conclusion

By providing dedicated physical servers without virtualization layers, the bare metal cloud empowers users with direct access to raw computing power and allows optimal performance with ultimate flexibility and customization. As per the analysis, the future of bare metal cloud providers looks extremely promising due to the emergence of AI and ML applications and an increased demand for high-performance computing solutions.