Overview – Scalable Bare Metal Service

Scalable Bare Metal (SBM) is a separate service from our standard dedicated server offering, Enterprise Bare Metal (EBM). SBM offers highly reliable servers with fixed configurations, hourly billing, and a unique operational model. This service combines the power of dedicated servers with the scalability of on-demand cloud solutions, allowing businesses to access powerful computing resources, without long-term commitments.

Concepts

Hourly billing model: pay only for actual usage, allowing for the cost-optimized management of unpredictable workloads, budget planning, and avoiding over-provisioning of resources.
Consistent performance: complete control over hardware and applications with no intermediaries. Each server is exclusively yours, ensuring predictable performance and eliminating the issue of "noisy neighbors".
Efficient infrastructure management: use our API to automate and optimize deployment, scaling, and management of your bare metal servers, seamlessly integrating with existing DevOps tools and processes.

Flavors

A flavor is a group of server models unified by their hardware parameters such as CPU, RAM and storage. servers.com provides you with several product lines that contain a wide range of flavors to satisfy different requirements:

DL (discount line) - an affordable server without specific requirements
EL (entry line) - best for routine tasks
BL (business line) - build complex corporate infrastructure
PL (performance line) - build powerful computing clusters

Use cases

Businesses can quickly scale their server capacity to handle sudden traffic spikes without long-term commitments
Developers can deploy servers as needed for testing purposes
Researchers and data scientists can access high-performance servers for intensive computational tasks, such as training machine learning models or large language models, without incurring unnecessary long-term costs
When integrated with managed Kubernetes services, hourly billed servers can be used to dynamically add worker nodes to a Kubernetes cluster, providing the resources needed to efficiently manage varying workloads

Features

Support for core dedicated server functions:

Operating system installation (excluding Windows)
Authentication method selection
VNC console support

Integration with network infrastructure:

Ability to add a server to an L2 segment

Management via API:

For more details follow our public API documentation

Limitations

To enable optimum speed and flexibility, our SBM service has limited functionality:

No Windows OS installation
No uplink selection and additional networks
No RAID and layout options: RAID 1 is a default option
No OOB access
No features and user data

The service is available in a few locations. A list will be displayed while ordering an SBM server.

Quotes

The default quota allows for up to 5 servers of a specific SBM configuration per account
The default quota allows for up to 10 different scalable bare metal configurations in total per account

Billing

The scalable bare metal service is offered on a post-paid, hourly billing model. Your account balance must cover the previous billing period and include enough funds to operate each server for an additional 12 hours.

There is no traffic commitment: you pay per-GB. All billing services related to scalable bare metal are billed hourly, including the minutes when the service starts and ends.