What Is Bare Metal Cloud? How It Works, Costs and Use Cases
The short answer
Bare metal cloud is a physical server that belongs to one customer, delivered and managed the way cloud services are: ordered online, installed automatically, and reinstalled or managed remotely without a support ticket. There is no hypervisor and no other tenant on the machine. You get all of its cores, memory and disks, with the convenience of cloud-style provisioning around them.
Bare metal server, defined: a bare metal server is a single physical computer dedicated to one customer, with the operating system running directly on the hardware instead of on a hypervisor. "Bare metal" means nothing sits between your software and the machine. Bare metal infrastructure is a fleet built from such servers rather than from virtual machines, chosen when consistent performance, full hardware access or single-tenant isolation matter more than instant elasticity.
How it differs from a VPS and from classic dedicated hosting
| Cloud VPS | Classic dedicated hosting | Bare metal cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware | A slice of a shared host | A whole machine | A whole machine |
| Hypervisor | Yes | No | No |
| Provisioning | Automated, in seconds | Manual, often days | Automated once the machine is available |
| Management | Web console and API | Support tickets | Remote console, OS reinstall and power control on demand |
| Billing | Per slice, often flexible | Per machine, usually long term | Per machine, monthly or longer terms |
A VPS shares one physical host between many customers, so your performance depends partly on your neighbours. Classic dedicated hosting gives you the whole machine, but setting it up and changing it usually means waiting on a person. Bare metal cloud keeps the whole machine and removes most of that waiting.
How it works in practice
You choose a configuration, and the provider allocates a physical server to you alone. The operating system is installed for you, your SSH key is placed on the machine, and you receive remote console and power control, so you can reboot into a recovery environment or reinstall without opening a ticket. From then on it behaves like any server you own outright: every core, every gigabyte of memory and every disk serves your workload only.
"Cloud" here describes how the server is delivered and managed, not shared hardware. That is the whole difference from a virtual machine.
What it costs
Bare metal is priced per machine rather than per slice, so the comparison with a VPS depends on size. At the small end, a VPS is far cheaper: our cloud VPS plans start at €19 per month. At the large end the picture reverses. Our BM-32 dedicated server (8 cores and 16 threads, 32GB of ECC memory, two 480GB SSDs mirrored) costs €200 per month, while our largest cloud VPS (8 vCPUs, 16GB of memory) costs €295, both excluding VAT. Above roughly six vCPUs, a dedicated machine is often the cheaper line item. What you pay for instead is commitment: longer terms and a wait for the hardware. Our bare metal vs cloud comparison has the full price table.
When it is the right choice
Bare metal cloud pays off when your servers are busy most of the time, when performance has to be predictable rather than merely adequate, or when compliance requires hardware that no one else touches. Databases, build and CI runners, video encoding and inference serving are typical examples.
It is the wrong choice when your load is spiky, when you need new capacity within minutes, or when your team would rather not own operating system updates and disk replacements. In those cases a cloud VPS earns its flexibility.
How RANDHOST does it
We offer four standard dedicated configurations in our Lisbon data centre, from 8 to 40 cores and 32GB to 192GB of ECC memory, starting at €200 per month excluding VAT, and we build custom servers in Lisbon, Johannesburg and Lagos. Larger custom builds are quoted on request: in Johannesburg, up to 512GB of ECC memory with NVMe storage; port speeds and bandwidth are quoted individually. Every standard server comes with remote console and power control, a 1Gbps dedicated port with a committed bandwidth tier (faster ports are quoted individually), an IPv4 /29 and IPv6, and a 99.9% uptime SLA, with no setup fee, on a 12-month term.
One honest difference from the "in seconds" end of the market: because we build to order rather than keep machines idle in stock, delivery typically takes 7 to 14 business days. See our dedicated servers page for the configurations, or read our guide to bare metal providers in Europe to compare the options.
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