You can grab new metal and have it all up and running in 60 seconds? That's amazing.

Yes. The API call is here: https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html#get-orde...

The thing is that most baremetal hosts are exactly as the parent described - annoyingly slow, manual, etc.

Hetzner is a little gem here, where they have a large selection of pre-specced machines that are ready for automated deployment, and they also show you a pool of cheaper machines that were returned by other customers/terminated/cancelled and automatically wiped with varying specs that you can also automatically pick out via API (this includes random upgrades that the ex-customers added).

If you manage to fit in the square hole that their automation occupies, it's a great fit.

yeah it works if you only need to serve europe. and if you do not need a private network for your servers (for metal they cost a lot of money, even on hetzner, they have a cloud tough which has a network feature). also keep in mind once you try to scale hetzner, is quickly a bottleneck. > 100 servers per hour.

EDIT: oh and also server buying/renting/installing is probably the smallest problem when running your own metal/colo or renting servers. a big use case for clouds is, data sharing between hosts via object storage/moveable disks, etc. which is non trivial on "bare metal/colo/renting" and that is just one use case.

There are certainly a lot of cons, yep. I feel like a lot of the arguments here are a bit apples and oranges, some people are getting really upset over it.

But sometimes, you just need a ton of bandwidth, compute, RAM, etc. and don't care about managed services.. I don't think there's a single major cloud provider that will give me a 2TB Intel DC SSD to use 100% of r/w for $20/m. And not being billed per-GB bandwidth is a massive relief for certain use cases.

> I use the host he mentioned - they have an API, and my average time to deploy a baremetal physical machine is under 60 seconds via API.

What makes you think it’s a “baremetal physical machine”? This description sounds very cloud-y to me.

I can KVM into it with a Lantronix Spider. I have dozens of them, and none of them have shown to be anything other than a physical machine; I can set up RAID myself, all the hardware data is passed through (there are no hypervisor layers in between).

I would be incredibly impressed if it was not baremetal.

I do have one dislike, which is how harshly they enforce mac addresses (so spinning up new VMs and bridging them into the network gets that mac blocked until you register it in the API or panel). And I guess the other dislike is that they're only in Europe, which is 200ms from me.

I guarantee you they don’t have the capacity to scale an internet business on demand. Not the way AWS or GCP can.