Bare metal

Bare-metal servers (or bare-metal cloud when API-driven) describe physical machines that run an operating system directly, with no hypervisor in between. You get 100 % of the CPU, full RAM, unshared disk I/O and can run latency-critical workloads (high-frequency trading, in-memory databases, AI inference on GPUs, high-frequency game servers) without virtualisation overhead. Modern bare-metal cloud offers (Hetzner Robot, Equinix Metal, AWS Outposts) automate provisioning so you can install an image in minutes and treat the machine like a cloud instance — at hourly instead of per-second pricing. If you don't need peak performance, a standard VPS is usually cheaper and more flexible.