High-density storage dedicated servers with multi-TB SAS/SATA arrays for backup and archive.
The rankings are warming up.
Storage dedicated servers aggregate several TB of storage in RAID (HDD, SAS, NL-SAS, SATA, sometimes SSD/NVMe for cache). Ideal for off-site backups, long-term archival, S3-compatible storage (Minio, Garage, Ceph), large-scale Nextcloud. Expect 100-500 €/month for 20-100 TB. Check supported RAID levels (RAID 6, ZFS) and hot-swap disk replacement.
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).