It's not as common, I agree, but I work for a data center company that does almost exclusively bare metal servers and colocation. We have a VPS part of our company but it's a different brand name and you won't find it on the main company's website.

I still have Hetzner for a dedicated server in Europe, and it's fine. I've had it for several years now with no issues.

Before getting this job, I noticed that most dedicated servers in America are from smaller companies that re-sell their dedicated servers or colocated servers from companies like my work's or other data centers (who mainly specialize in colocation services instead of selling their own hardware.

I suppose in America, the main people companies target are for simple cheap VPS servers or "cloud scaling" services. You can also make a lot more imo by stuffing as many customers onto 1 server instead of dedicated hardware for each customer. Also a lot less management and support needed. At work 99% of our maintenance and support is for individual dedicated servers. The VPS side of the company requires very little intervention on our end.

It’s definitely a thing, every major metro has tons of data centers doing it to various degrees of success. For the most part it’s for small/medium folks, as larger buy and staff their own equipment, and many smaller do VPS or cloud for various reasons.

Dedicated is starting to make more sense as cloud prices are kinda nuts + tooling is better now, so ‘roll your own cloud’ is becoming more feasible.

It just doesn’t get as much press as the big cloud offerings, and most of them are relatively local players specializing in their region (and associated network/property). OVH has several large DCs selling dedicated hardware for rent here in the US.

Do you have an example of being able to rent a single bare metal node, with the cost of the rack already priced in? I've never seen it, especially not like Hetzner where it can cost as little as $50/mo all inclusive for a full server.

I'm not sure what it is that you're not finding. I can just search 'dedicated server' and the first page has several examples of places that will rent you a single bare metal server in the US. There are dozens and dozens of options.

The first one I clicked on has options around $50 too: https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/dedicated-servers/our-pric...

Woops, sorry last time I checked was a couple years ago, I don't know why I failed then, seems there's plenty options now. Thanks!

Leaseweb, they're a European company but with several US datacenter locations. They offer monthly priced dedicated servers, but are more expensive than Hetzner.

Also check out https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36 . That has plenty of US hosts at around that price range too

> ‘roll your own cloud’ is becoming more feasible

https://opennebula.io is worth looking at for that sort of thing (not that it's new). You don't have to do it that way, but its "edge" support for simple provisioning on bare metal providers doesn't include Hetzner; I think it assumes you can get instances on demand. That sort of solution isn't complex or expensive enough for my site, and doubtless others, though. Especially when you just want compute, I can't see the point in the pain (which surprised us) and expense of AWS et al.