> Where does co-location and transfer come from when someone says bare metal.
Parent was not happy with cloud providers. Tbh, I see the low end bare metal boxes with automatic provisioning as just another cloud provider. It's just not VMs. Apart from noisy neighbours, you end up with mostly the same types of issues.
There are a few providers offering cheap dedicated servers at that range, OVH's budget lines are popular (though often sold out for that reason): $11/mo for a machine with 2T storage, $17 for 2x2T so you can RAID them for safety, and a bit over your budget one with 3x2T or a pair of 480G SSDs.
But you generally get an ancient CPU, limited bandwidth, and old drives (so I do recommend RAID if you get a machine with more than one drive), with that sort of offer, so if very much depends on what you want to use the resource far. The cheapest machines I mentioned above are Atom N8200s, the next few up old Xeon E3 models, all their budget line are limited to 100mbit, and so on. Depending on your use case this may be a great compromise for guaranteed performance (unlike with a VPS where you may have very noisy neighbours) or if storage is far more important to your application than processing umpf. Of course for other cases it might be a terrible compromise: for many applications the potential to burst CPU use to much more than those Atoms can give you, and/or burst network throughput significantly over 100mbit, will make a VPS with less storage and less performance stability far more attractive. Also a good VPS provider will have good storage redundancy so you don't have to worry about RAID & related (though still, do keep off-provider backups in case of provider failure).
[only picking OVH because I have experience using a couple of their machines, there are other companies with not dissimilar offers]
Another factor is that with there being far fewer budget server providers compared to VPS providers, you might not get a cheap machine in your preferred location. If most of your customer base is in Asia then a server in France or Canada might not be suitable, or if your use case involves holding PII you might need something in your home country to simplify legal matters in that area.
> > Bare metal is cheaper to run
Though that isn't true for all use cases. Maybe not most. For very small workloads, for instance, cloud often wins on both cost and convenience. For larger or less predictable ones though, VPSs and dedicated servers can be better value and more predictable performance and cost (at the expense of some of that convenience). Different jobs, different tools.
Online.net is the first one that comes to mind. There are others.
FYI, with dedicated servers you don’t pay for colo separately. It’s included in the monthly fee. Bandwidth also, although on low end plans bandwidth might be limited or metered above some threshold.
Where do you get bare metal server + colo + transfer that's under $19/mth over the typical lifespan? Let's say 5 years, so $1140 in total?