Colocation in tier III/IV datacenters - bring your own hardware, the host provides power, cooling and bandwidth.
The rankings are warming up.
Colocation means leasing rack space in the host's datacenter while bringing your own hardware. The host provides power (1-30 A per U), cooling, bandwidth and physical security. A solution for organisations that already invested in hardware or want ultra-specific specs. Pricing: 30-200 €/U/month depending on the datacenter (Tier III, IV) and connectivity (IX peering, transit).
Bare-metal is a single physical machine with full hardware access. Dedicated cloud stays virtualised but with pinned CPU cores and reserved RAM. Bare-metal is faster and more predictable, dedicated cloud more flexible (snapshots, scaling).
EPYC shines on parallel workloads (containers, distributed databases) with more cores per euro. Xeon is still preferred for application compatibility and some high-clock workloads. Benchmark your specific workload.
1 Gbps unmetered suits most web workloads. For streaming, CDN or heavy backups, aim for 10 Gbps. Also check uplink quality (Tier 1 transit vs IX peering).