Bare-Metal Pricing Split: Hetzner NVMe Value vs OVH/Leaseweb Tiers — While Equinix Metal Exits
Overview
Dedicated bare-metal pricing is no longer “roughly comparable” across vendors — the market has split into distinct pricing philosophies: value-first compute + NVMe bundles (Hetzner), tiered enterprise stacks (OVHcloud), and configurable premium hardware (Leaseweb). At the same time, Equinix Metal has put a clock on long-lived deployments with an official end-of-service date.
Hetzner’s AX162-S is the clearest value signal right now: AMD EPYC 9454P, 128 GB DDR5, and 2 × 3.84 TB NVMe Datacenter Edition (Gen4) starting at €199/month (plus a one-off setup fee shown on the product page). (hetzner.com) That’s ~7.68 TB of NVMe in the base bundle, translating to roughly €0.026/GB/month before you even account for the 48-core CPU. (hetzner.com) For operators running validator fleets, this is a “cheap storage floor” that changes how you think about database safety margins, retention windows, and RAID1 overhead.
Context
OVHcloud’s public web “prices” page is less transparent (it gates detail behind account flow), but OVH’s published pricelist PDFs show the underlying model: a base server price plus priced options for memory and storage, including large NVMe packs on certain lines. (OVHcloud) Example: the “Baremetal Pod / SecNumcloud” price list shows SCALE servers with base monthly pricing (e.g., SCALE-A2 at €531.99/month) and storage options that can push total monthly cost much higher (e.g., 6 × 7.68 TB NVMe listed at €873.60/month on the sheet).
Sources
- Hetzner AX162-S product page
- OVHcloud prices page + OVH pricelist PDF
- Leaseweb R7525 configurator
- Equinix Metal docs sunset notice
- Hetzner sets a new NVMe value floor: AX162-S bundles 7.68 TB NVMe starting at €199/month (~€0.026/GB/mo). (hetzner.com)
- OVH pricing is tiered + modular: published pricelists show base server pricing plus storage packs, which can drive totals into higher bands. (OVHcloud)
- Leaseweb is configurable premium: base R7525 pricing is visible, but storage economics depend on add-ons, not bundles. (Leaseweb)
- Equinix Metal has a hard end date: service sunsets June 30, 2026, so plan migrations now. (Equinix Documentation)