Bare-metal server / virtual private server (VPS)
Bare metal rents you the whole physical machine; a VPS rents you an isolated virtual slice of a shared machine.
See it
What it is
A bare-metal server gives one customer the whole physical machine. A virtual private server gives that customer an isolated virtual machine on a host whose CPU, memory, and disks may be shared with other tenants through a hypervisor such as KVM.
Reach for a VPS for ordinary sites, small services, and inexpensive root access. Reach for bare metal when you need predictable sustained performance, unusual hardware, very large local storage, or software licensing tied to physical CPUs. Hetzner and OVHcloud are the names people reach for when the bare-metal price per core is the point.
The industry term for a busy tenant next door is the noisy neighbor problem, and it can affect a poorly isolated VPS, though reputable hosts work to control it. Bare metal removes that neighbor but costs more, provisions more slowly, and leaves a whole machine unavailable when its hardware fails. Neither option removes patching, backups, or capacity work.
Ask AI for it
Inspect this workload and choose between OVHcloud Bare Metal and an OVHcloud VPS based on sustained CPU, RAM, local disk, traffic, and recovery needs. Produce a cloud-init configuration that creates a non-root admin user, installs security updates, disables password SSH login, enables a firewall, and starts the service under systemd, then state which requirements made bare metal or VPS the better fit.