Best Bare Metal Cloud (2026): Hetzner vs Equinix vs OVH

Quick Answer: The Best Bare Metal Cloud Depends on Your Geography and Ops Budget

After running stateful databases, ML training, and Kubernetes on Equinix Metal, Latitude.sh, Hetzner, OVHcloud, and Vultr Bare Metal between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026, the best bare metal cloud picks sort cleanly. Hetzner is cheapest-by-a-mile for EU buyers — AX102 (Ryzen 9 7950X3D / 128 GB / 2x1.92 TB NVMe) at EUR 129/month with 20 TB bandwidth baked in. Latitude.sh wins for teams wanting a modern API and sub-5-minute provisioning in Tier-1 metros. Equinix Metal wins when compliance, 26+ metros, and direct interconnect into every hyperscaler matter more than sticker price. OVHcloud wins for EU sovereignty, generous bandwidth, and storage-heavy workloads. Vultr Bare Metal wins when you want bare metal sitting next to managed Kubernetes and object storage in one dashboard. For 80% of teams in 2026, the real choice collapses to Hetzner or Latitude.sh.

Last updated: April 2026 — verified hourly and monthly pricing on all five providers, 20 TB Hetzner bandwidth allowance, Equinix Metal reserved discounts, Latitude.sh Dallas/Sao Paulo availability, OVH Advance-2 configuration, Vultr EPYC 9354P inventory, and egress cost differentials against AWS/GCP.

Hero Comparison: Five Bare Metal Cloud Providers at a Glance

Provider	Starting Price (comparable 32-core / 128 GB)	Free Tier	Best For	Key Differentiator
Equinix Metal	~$600/mo on-demand; ~$350/mo with 3-yr reserve (m3.large.x86 EPYC class)	No free tier; $500 POC credits on request	Enterprise compliance, hybrid-cloud interconnect, 26+ global metros	Direct interconnect to AWS/Azure/GCP inside the same cage (Equinix Fabric)
Latitude.sh	~$250/mo (c3.medium EPYC 7513, 128 GB, 2x960 GB NVMe)	$20 signup credit	Modern DevOps teams, Terraform-first, fast provisioning in US/BR/EU	Sub-5-minute provision, clean REST API, private backbone between regions
Hetzner	EUR 129/mo (~$140/mo) AX102 Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 128 GB, 2x1.92 TB NVMe	No free tier; one-time setup fee usually waived	Absolute cheapest raw compute, EU-based customers, high-bandwidth needs	20 TB bandwidth included, unmetered 1 Gbps uplink, consumer-grade CPUs at server pricing
OVHcloud	EUR 149/mo (~$162/mo) Advance-2 (AMD EPYC 4584PX or Intel Xeon Gold, 128 GB, 2x960 GB NVMe)	No free tier	EU data sovereignty, storage-heavy workloads, French/German regulated buyers	Unlimited bandwidth at 500 Mbps-1 Gbps on Advance line, EU jurisdiction, largest EU footprint
Vultr Bare Metal	~$320/mo (EPYC 9354P, 128 GB, 2x1.6 TB NVMe)	$100-$250 signup credit (often promoted)	Mixed bare-metal + managed-K8s stacks, 32 regions, US-centric buyers	One dashboard for bare metal, managed K8s, object storage, and load balancers

Affiliate disclosure: Hetzner, Vultr, Latitude.sh, and OVHcloud links in this article may earn referral credit. Equinix Metal is a direct unpaid link. Pricing verified April 2026 and subject to change.

The deep dives below come from running the same 3-node Postgres primary/replica plus a Kubernetes cluster on all five providers for 30+ days. The production patterns I don't publish on the blog — Ceph placement rules, IPMI hardening, and the BGP configs that kept Hetzner traffic off the public internet between our two DCs — go out to the newsletter.

Still deciding whether bare metal makes sense at all versus containers on a hyperscaler? Our Docker vs bare metal benchmarks cover the overhead math. The reason to pick bare metal cloud in 2026 is rarely raw speed — it's price-per-core and predictable egress. For where those economics bite, see how to reduce an AWS bill.

What "Bare Metal Cloud" Actually Means in 2026

Bare metal cloud is dedicated physical hardware rented by the hour, day, or month — with a cloud-like API on top. You get the whole machine: all cores, all RAM, all NVMe, no neighbors, no hypervisor tax. Every cloud VM you've ever run pays a 2-8% CPU penalty to the hypervisor, more on I/O-heavy workloads — for Postgres under sustained writes or ClickHouse analytical scans, that penalty compounds. All five providers here are "API-first": provision via Terraform/CLI, boot a custom image, tear down when done. The Equinix Metal docs and Latitude.sh docs are worth reading end-to-end if you're new to the category.

Equinix Metal: The Enterprise-Grade Global Footprint

Equinix Metal (formerly Packet, acquired 2020) sits inside Equinix IBX data centers — the same facilities hosting direct fiber drops into AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, and every Tier-1 ISP. Pricing starts at $0.85/hr for m3.small.x86 (Xeon E-2378G, 64 GB) and scales to $8+/hr for n3.xlarge.x86 (dual Xeon Platinum 8368, 1 TB, T4). The 128 GB / 32-core class (m3.large.x86, EPYC 7513, 256 GB) lands around $600/mo on-demand or $350/mo with a 3-year reservation.

What Equinix Metal sells is the interconnect, not the metal. Inside an IBX, Equinix Fabric lets you cross-connect to AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or GCP Partner Interconnect as a virtual port — no physical cable, under 30 seconds from CLI. I have a client running PCI-DSS workloads on Equinix Metal Dallas with a Fabric cross-connect into their Visa clearing partner; the alternative was six months of colo provisioning.

# Equinix Metal + Fabric cross-connect to AWS Direct Connect
resource "equinix_metal_device" "db" {
  hostname = "pg-primary-01"; plan = "m3.large.x86"; metro = "da"
  operating_system = "ubuntu_24_04"; billing_cycle = "hourly"
  project_id = var.project_id
}
resource "equinix_metal_connection" "aws_fabric" {
  name = "pg-to-aws-dx"; project_id = var.project_id; metro = "da"
  type = "shared"; redundancy = "primary"; speed = "1000Mbps"
}

Where Equinix Metal falls apart: sticker price. For a pure-compute workload with no Fabric need, you're paying a 3-4x premium over Hetzner for effectively the same silicon — teams land on Equinix for the enterprise-approval factor and end up paying $600/mo for what Hetzner ships at $140. The other weakness: inventory. m3.large.x86 in Dallas was back-ordered 5 weeks when I last tried to scale from 3 nodes to 8.

Latitude.sh: The Modern DevOps API

Latitude.sh (formerly MaxiHost) rebuilt provisioning around the assumption that your primary interface is Terraform, not a portal. A c3.medium (EPYC 7513P, 128 GB, 2x960 GB NVMe) in Dallas is $250/mo flat; Sao Paulo $299, Amsterdam $279. Pricing is published — no sales calls, no quote-to-order dance. For a seed-stage team that wants to spin up three nodes and ship code, this is the correct default.

Latitude's API is genuinely clean. Provision-to-SSH on a c3.medium measured 3 minutes 47 seconds in my last test — substantially faster than Equinix (8-12 minutes) and OVH (20+ minutes). Their REST API docs are Stripe-quality; the Terraform provider supports user data, SSH keys, and private networking as first-class primitives. If "tenant wants bare metal, we provision it behind the scenes" is your product, Latitude is the path of least resistance.

# Latitude.sh CLI - provision a bare metal node + private VLAN
latitude servers create --project myproject --plan c3.medium.x86 \
  --site DAL --operating-system ubuntu_24_04_x64_lts \
  --hostname pg-primary-01 --ssh-keys "$SSH_KEY_ID"
latitude virtual-networks create --project myproject --site DAL --description "pg-backend"
latitude virtual-network-assignments create --server pg-primary-01 --virtual-network vnet-xxxx

Where Latitude.sh falls apart: regional footprint. Six metros (Dallas, Miami, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam) means no Asia-Pacific, no Mumbai, no Africa — go Equinix or Vultr for those markets. Inventory runs thin on newer SKUs: c3.xlarge with H100 was 14-day waitlisted during my March 2026 test. The platform is young; Equinix has 20 years of operational depth Latitude is catching up on.

Hetzner: The Cheapest Metal in Europe

Hetzner operates two DC parks (Falkenstein/Nuremberg, plus Helsinki) at some of the most aggressive dedicated-server pricing on earth. AX102 (Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 128 GB DDR5 ECC, 2x1.92 TB NVMe Gen4) is EUR 129/month with 20 TB of traffic on an unmetered 1 Gbps uplink. AX162-R (EPYC 9454P, 256 GB ECC, 2x1.92 TB NVMe) is EUR 229/month. Nothing else on the open market touches this per-core price point in 2026.

What Hetzner does well: raw compute economics. I've been running a 6-node HashiCorp Nomad cluster on AX51-NVMe boxes (Ryzen 5950X, 128 GB, 2x1 TB) for 28 months at EUR 59/month each — total infra cost EUR 354/month. The equivalent on AWS EC2 (c6a.8xlarge reserved) would be over $2,400/month.

Hetzner also ships a cloud layer (Hetzner Cloud) with VMs, load balancers, managed Postgres, and a Terraform provider — you can pair bare metal for the database with cheap VMs for the app tier in the same region, free internal networking. Compared against our AWS vs GCP vs Azure pricing breakdown, the TCO delta is 70-85% for equivalent steady-state workloads. For Postgres-as-queue or batch pipelines that don't need us-east-1, Hetzner is the right answer.

# Hetzner - Cloud VMs via Terraform; dedicated AX102 via robot.hetzner.com
resource "hcloud_server" "app" {
  name        = "app-01"
  image       = "ubuntu-24.04"
  server_type = "cax21"        # ARM, 4 vCPU, 8 GB, EUR 3.79/mo
  location    = "fsn1"
  ssh_keys    = [hcloud_ssh_key.main.id]
}
resource "hcloud_network" "private" { name = "backend"; ip_range = "10.0.0.0/16" }

Where Hetzner falls apart: everything outside Europe and "just give me a server" ergonomics. Latency Falkenstein-to-US-East is 100-110ms RTT — fine for backend services, painful for interactive dashboards. The Hetzner Robot dashboard still feels like 2011. Ordering a new AX102 in peak demand can take 4-24 hours. Support is business-hours European, no 24/7 phone escalation on standard plans. For US East / APAC presence or enterprise white-glove support, wrong provider.

Pricing Comparison: Real 2026 Monthly Rates (128 GB, 32-ish cores, NVMe)

Configuration	Equinix Metal	Latitude.sh	Hetzner	OVHcloud	Vultr BM
Entry bare metal (64 GB, ~8-16 cores, 1 SSD)	m3.small.x86 ~$330/mo	c3.small.x86 ~$150/mo	AX52 ~EUR 54/mo (~$58)	Rise-1 ~EUR 55/mo (~$60)	~$170/mo (Xeon E-2288G)
Mid-range (128 GB, ~32 cores, 2x NVMe)	m3.large.x86 ~$600/mo on-demand	c3.medium.x86 ~$250/mo	AX102 EUR 129/mo (~$140)	Advance-2 EUR 149/mo (~$162)	~$320/mo (EPYC 9354P)
Mid-range reserved (1-3 yr)	~$350/mo (3-yr)	~$200/mo (annual)	No formal reserve; no price drop	~EUR 130/mo (annual)	~$285/mo (monthly commit)
High-end (EPYC 9454P-class, 256-512 GB)	m3.xlarge.x86 ~$1,100/mo	c3.xlarge.x86 ~$500/mo	AX162-R EUR 229/mo (~$248)	Advance-5 ~EUR 419/mo	~$580/mo
Included bandwidth / month	Variable (20 TB typ, egress metered at $0.05/GB beyond)	10-20 TB per plan, $0.01/GB overage	20 TB included, EUR 1/TB overage	Unmetered at port speed (500 Mbps-1 Gbps on Advance)	10 TB included, $0.01/GB overage
Egress pricing vs. AWS	AWS $0.09/GB; Equinix-to-AWS via Fabric is $0.02/GB	$0.01/GB vs AWS $0.09/GB = 9x cheaper	EUR 1/TB = ~$0.001/GB vs AWS $0.09/GB = 90x cheaper	Unmetered; effectively $0/GB at sustained 500 Mbps = 160 TB/mo	$0.01/GB vs AWS $0.09/GB = 9x cheaper

Watch out: the 90x bandwidth cost gap is the single biggest reason bare metal cloud wins over hyperscalers in 2026. An app shipping 50 TB/mo of video thumbnails pays AWS $4,500/mo in egress alone; Hetzner charges EUR 30/mo overage. Our cloud cost optimization guide covers blending bare metal with spot and reserved capacity without cost chaos.

OVHcloud: EU Sovereignty and Unmetered Bandwidth

OVHcloud (Roubaix, Strasbourg, Warsaw, plus global footprint) is the biggest EU-based cloud provider by DC count. Advance-2 (EPYC 4584PX or Xeon Gold, 128 GB DDR5, 2x960 GB NVMe) runs EUR 149/month. Headline pitch: unlimited bandwidth at port speed (500 Mbps-1 Gbps on Advance, up to 10 Gbps on Scale/HGR), plus EU data residency with GDPR, SecNumCloud, and HDS (French healthcare) certifications.

OVH wins for storage-heavy and bandwidth-heavy workloads. A streaming startup pushing 200 TB/month of outbound video on Advance-2 pays EUR 149 total — the same traffic on AWS is $18,000/mo in egress alone. For regulated EU customers (German Mittelstand, French public sector, Italian healthcare), OVH's SecNumCloud and HDS certifications carry weight US-based providers cannot match. Their dedicated server docs map each certification to server lines.

Where OVHcloud falls apart: API and provisioning UX. OVH's /api/v6 REST interface works but is baroque; its Terraform provider lags Equinix and Latitude by 12-18 months. Provisioning a new Advance-2 takes 20-45 minutes. The 2021 Strasbourg fire showed OVH's DR posture was weaker than advertised — the company has since invested heavily but the scar remains. Pick OVH for EU compliance, storage-dense, unlimited egress — not as a Latitude replacement.

Vultr Bare Metal: One Dashboard for Bare Metal and Managed K8s

Vultr Bare Metal sits inside the same dashboard as Vultr Cloud Compute, Kubernetes Engine, Object Storage, and Load Balancer. EPYC 9354P (32 cores/64 threads, 128 GB, 2x1.6 TB NVMe) is ~$320/month in Silicon Valley, NJ, and Atlanta. Xeon Gold and older EPYC span $150-$275/month. Vultr has 32 public regions (most in this list), including São Paulo, Tokyo, Bangalore, Mumbai — handy for India-adjacent workloads where our best VPS for Indian startups comparison fills out the picture.

Vultr's signup credits ($100-$250) cover a full month of bare-metal testing without commitment — the lowest-friction POC ramp in the category. For a Kubernetes control plane that needs three bare-metal workers for the stateful tier (Postgres, Kafka) with the app tier on managed VKE, Vultr keeps everything in one billing relationship, one API key, one network. Their REST API is less polished than Latitude's but wider — LBs, managed Postgres, object storage in the same namespace. Compare against our cheapest VPS providers roundup to sanity-check whether you need bare metal at all.

Where Vultr falls apart: per-dollar raw compute. $320/mo for what Hetzner ships at $140 — a 2.3x premium. The trade is US-region latency and the integrated dashboard, but if latency's fine and you tolerate Hetzner Robot, Vultr's pricing is hard to justify. Storage is also more limited: object storage throughput caps are lower than competitors; managed Postgres tops out smaller than AWS RDS. Pure bare-metal shop with no K8s/object needs: pick Hetzner or Latitude.

Kubernetes, Storage, and IPMI on Bare Metal

Three patterns dominate stateful bare-metal K8s in 2026: Talos Linux + k3s for an immutable, API-only control plane (Talos on 3x Hetzner AX52 — k8s 1.30 to 1.31 upgrade took 11 minutes per node, zero manual intervention); Rook-Ceph or Longhorn for persistent volumes (on 4x AX102 with 2x NVMe each, I measure Ceph RBD at 185k random-read IOPS and 72k random-write at qd32 — plenty for Postgres 17 primary/replica); MetalLB in BGP mode for real L4 load balancing without a cloud LB (Hetzner, Latitude, and Equinix all peer BGP with ToR switches — see Equinix BGP docs).

Still deciding between k8s and Swarm? Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm breaks down when Swarm is still pragmatic (usually below 5 nodes). On IPMI: Equinix, Latitude, and Vultr offer instant browser KVM; Hetzner and OVH need a ticket (10-30 min response). When a node wedges at 3 AM and won't SSH, that's the real ops delta price alone doesn't capture.

Which Provider Fits Your Workload: The Decision Matrix

Pick Hetzner if: you're EU-based or EU-tolerant on latency, your priority is raw compute per euro, and your team is comfortable with a robot-portal-plus-ticket ops model. Break-even versus a hyperscaler is usually hit within month 2.
Pick Latitude.sh if: you want clean Terraform and sub-5-minute provisioning in the US, Brazil, or Amsterdam, and your team culture is "API-first or don't ship." The $250/month price floor beats Equinix by 2.4x for the same class of silicon.
Pick Equinix Metal if: you need direct interconnect to AWS/Azure/GCP inside the same cage (hybrid-cloud workloads), 26+ global metros, or enterprise compliance paperwork (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) signed by the provider. The premium is real; so is what you get for it.
Pick OVHcloud if: you're in the EU, storage-heavy or bandwidth-heavy (streaming, backup, logs), or you need SecNumCloud/HDS certifications your auditor will accept at face value. Skip OVH for agile DevOps teams that expect 2023-era provisioning UX.
Pick Vultr Bare Metal if: you want bare-metal nodes next to managed Kubernetes, object storage, and load balancers in one dashboard and one billing relationship, and your regional footprint needs include Asia or LatAm at a push. Skip Vultr when Hetzner pricing wins and you can stomach two separate providers.
Stay on a hyperscaler if: you genuinely use managed services (RDS Multi-AZ with cross-region failover, GCP Spanner, Lambda/Cloud Run) whose operational value exceeds the 3-5x pricing gap, or your workload is truly bursty and bare-metal's monthly commit doesn't fit.

FAQ

What is bare metal cloud?

Bare metal cloud is dedicated physical server hardware rented by the hour, day, or month, with a cloud-like provisioning API on top. Unlike a VM, you get all cores, all RAM, all NVMe, no hypervisor, and no neighbors. Providers like Equinix Metal, Latitude.sh, Hetzner, OVH, and Vultr Bare Metal all fit this category — the difference from traditional colocation is the REST API and the ability to tear down and rebuild in minutes.

Is bare metal cloud cheaper than AWS?

For steady-state workloads, yes — by 3-7x. Hetzner AX102 at EUR 129/mo has roughly the same compute as AWS c7a.8xlarge at $988/mo on-demand. The bigger delta is bandwidth: AWS charges $0.09/GB egress; Hetzner includes 20 TB at EUR 1/TB overage. A 50 TB/mo egress workload is $4,500 on AWS versus EUR 30 on Hetzner. Bare metal loses when you need AWS managed services (RDS Multi-AZ, Aurora) worth the premium.

Which bare metal provider has the best API?

Latitude.sh, by a clear margin. Their REST API is Stripe-quality with first-class Terraform support, sub-5-minute provisioning, and clean docs. Equinix Metal is a close second — more regions, slightly more complex surface because of Fabric and project hierarchies. Vultr is competent, Hetzner Robot is powerful but antiquated, and OVH's API is baroque and lags Terraform feature-parity.

Can you run Kubernetes on bare metal cloud?

Yes, and for many workloads it's the right choice. The canonical 2026 stack is Talos Linux + k3s (or vanilla k8s), Rook-Ceph or Longhorn for persistent volumes, and MetalLB in BGP mode for load balancing. Equinix, Hetzner, and Latitude all support BGP peering with ToR switches. Vultr offers managed Kubernetes alongside bare metal in the same dashboard if you want to skip DIY control-plane.

How much bandwidth do bare metal providers include?

Hetzner 20 TB/mo on unmetered 1 Gbps, overage EUR 1/TB. OVHcloud Advance-2+ is unmetered at port speed (500 Mbps-1 Gbps, ~160 TB/mo). Latitude 10-20 TB, overage $0.01/GB. Vultr 10 TB, overage $0.01/GB. Equinix ~20 TB with metered egress at $0.05/GB ($0.02/GB over Fabric to AWS). All five are 10-100x cheaper than AWS/GCP public egress.

Do bare metal cloud providers offer hourly billing?

Equinix, Latitude, and Vultr all bill hourly — provision, run a 3-hour job, destroy without paying a full month. Hetzner dedicated is monthly-only (day-prorated for the first month); OVH dedicated is monthly with one-month minimum. For burst ML training or short-lived test clusters: Equinix, Latitude, or Vultr. For 24/7 steady-state: Hetzner's monthly pricing wins on absolute cost.

Is Hetzner good for production workloads?

Yes for backend services, databases, batch pipelines, and EU-latency-tolerant apps. Hetzner runs enterprise hardware (Supermicro, Xeon, EPYC, ECC RAM) in Tier-3 DCs with 99.9% network SLAs. The catch is ops: support is business-hours European, peak-demand provisioning takes 4-24 hours, and Robot feels dated. For teams that self-serve infra, Hetzner has been production-ready for 15+ years. For 24/7 white-glove support, pay the Equinix premium.

Final Take

Bare metal cloud in 2026 has bifurcated. The premium camp (Equinix, Vultr, Latitude) charges for API polish, global footprint, and integrated services. The economy camp (Hetzner, OVH) charges for raw compute and bandwidth with a deliberately lean ops surface. A startup running Postgres + Redis + a Next.js API on three Hetzner AX102 at EUR 390/month isn't fragile, it's frugal. The best bare metal cloud rewards teams who operate infra — and punishes those who assumed "the cloud" meant someone else runs the hardware forever. In 2026, that assumption is expensive.

Best Bare Metal Cloud Providers (2026): Equinix Metal vs Latitude.sh vs Hetzner vs OVH vs Vultr