Hetzner is an example. Been using them for years and it's been a solid experience so far. OVH should be able to match them, and there's others, I'm sure.

Hetzner is pretty excellent quality service overall. OVH is very low quality service, especially with the networking and admin pane.

hetzner.de, online.net, ovh.com, netcup.de for the EU-market.

Anywhere. Really.

Cloud costs roughly 4x than bare metal for sustained usage (of my workload). Even with the heavy discounts we get for being a large customer it’s still much more expensive. But I guess op-ex > cap-ex

Lots of responses, and I appreciate them, but I'm specifically looking for a bare metal server with "tons of RAM", that is at the same or lower price point as a google/microsoft/amazon "small" node.

I've never seen any of the providers listed offer "tons of ram" (unless we consider hundreds / low thousands of megabytes to be "tons") at that price point.

I've had pretty good luck with Green House Data's Colo Service and their Cloud offerings. A couple of RU's in the data center can host 1000's of VM's in multi-regions with great connectivity between them.