Bare metal destroys AWS and other big managed clouds and even smaller cloud companies like Digital Ocean if all you need is compute, storage, and bandwidth and

Bare metal destroys AWS and other big managed clouds and even smaller cloud companies like Digital Ocean if all you need is compute, storage, and bandwidth and want to manage it yourself. Bandwidth is even more extreme than CPU/RAM. There are high bandwidth bare metal vendors that basically sell like rack vendors by capacity, not quantity, and offer bandwidth at stupidly cheap rates compared to any cloud. ZeroTier uses these for root server clusters and get tens of gigabits for <$1000/server... and you can actually use that and it's fine. Vendors include datapacket.com, reliablesite.net, fdcservers.net, and others. Totally no frills though. They provision it, turn it on, and give you access. Also their TOS may have specific prohibitions, so read it. The problem is that you have to manage it all yourself, which can be challenging and distracting, and these are no frills services with no add-ons like managed or specialized databases or S3. That being said the cost savings are so extreme that you should consider it. It's ultimately a spreadsheet decision. Compare cost of hosting vs cost of DIY hosting plus labor for your specific application. Some apps benefit more from managed cloud than others. There's also the multi-cloud option. You could host things that benefit from AWS or GCP there, and host the bandwidth or CPU-intensive stuff on bare metal.