Bare metal vs cloud vs colocation: which do you actually need?

Most teams do not have a “cloud problem.” They have a workload, a budget, a compliance line they cannot cross, and a deadline. The right infrastructure falls out of those four constraints, not the other way around. This guide compares the three real options in plain language, with the technical detail underneath for the people who want it, and gives you a framework to decide.

The three options, defined

Public cloud rents you a slice of a shared machine, by the hour, with everything automated. Bare metal gives you a whole physical server that is yours alone, still provisioned on demand. Colocation is renting space, power, and connectivity for hardware you already own. They are not rivals so much as different points on a line that runs from “someone else owns and operates everything” to “you own and operate everything.”

Public cloud: convenience, until it isn’t

The hyperscalers are excellent at one thing above all: starting from nothing. You can launch a server in a minute and turn it off an hour later, and you only pay for the hour. For spiky, unpredictable, or early-stage workloads, that elasticity is genuinely worth paying for, and it is why most projects should start there.

The economics invert when the workload becomes steady and large. You are now paying a premium for elasticity you no longer use, sharing physical hardware with other tenants, and often sending both your data and your spend out of the country. For a team running the same heavy database every day, an always-on cloud instance can become the single largest line in the infrastructure budget.

Bare metal: the whole machine, on demand

A bare metal server is a single physical machine dedicated entirely to you. No hypervisor, no shared tenants, no noisy neighbours. You get the full performance of the hardware and complete control over it — but you still get it on demand and pay month to month, the way you would a cloud instance. That combination, hardware performance with a cloud-like delivery model, is what “Bare Metal as a Service” means.

This is the ideal fit for steady, performance-sensitive workloads: production databases, SAP and ERP systems, virtualisation hosts you run yourself, CI fleets, game and media servers, and anything where consistent performance matters more than burst elasticity.

Colocation: your hardware, our facility

If you already own servers, or you have specific hardware requirements, colocation lets you place that hardware in a professional data center and rent only the things that are genuinely hard to run well: power, cooling, physical security, and connectivity. You keep ownership and full control of the machines; you stop worrying about generators and air conditioning.

A decision framework

Work through these in order. The first one that clearly matches your situation is usually your answer.

• Is the load early-stage or genuinely unpredictable? Start on public cloud for the elasticity, and revisit once usage is steady.
• Is the load steady, heavy, and performance-sensitive? Bare metal will usually be faster and cheaper than the equivalent always-on cloud instance.
• Do you already own hardware, or need specialised kit? Colocation lets you keep the machines and rent only the facility.
• Is the data regulated, or subject to residency rules? Bare metal or colocation in your own jurisdiction keeps data provably in-country.
• Do you want both? Run bare metal locally and connect privately to the public cloud with a cloud on-ramp. Hybrid is a normal operating model, not a compromise.

Where Metal on Cloud fits

We are a Bare Metal as a Service company: dedicated servers delivered on demand, with managed colocation, cloud on-ramps, and fully managed operations around them. Everything runs on our own network (AS203905), multi-homed across multiple upstream providers for redundancy and IX-peered in Nairobi, from a partner Tier-III data center. For teams in East Africa, that means consistent performance, data that stays in-region, and a team in your time zone — without the hyperscaler premium.