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AWS
aws.amazon.com › compute › amazon ec2 › pricing
Pricing
2 days ago - Savings Plans can help you reduce your bill by up to 72% compared to On-Demand prices in exchange for a usage commitment. ... With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, you can use spare Amazon EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › aws bare metal service - questions
r/aws on Reddit: AWS bare metal service - questions
December 28, 2022 -

Hi everyone! I've been trying to understand certain AWS features & pricing and would really appreciate insights based on your ezlerience.

  1. What discounts normally apply for 1 and 3 year reservations respectively of EC2 or RDS storage capacity, if any? This concerns storage products such as gp2, gp3, io1, io2, st1, database magnetic and backup storage

  2. What is the listing/discounted price for 1 and 3 years reservations of bare metal instances of types ls4gen and D3gen? In which availability zones are these services available?

  3. There is a thin hypervisor layer on top of bare metal deployed by AWS. Generally speaking, do user space applications run on top of aws bare metal instances (specifically interested in intel spdk)?

Appreciate input on any of these!

People also ask

What are bare metal servers?
Bare metal servers are physical servers dedicated to a single tenant, offering maximum performance, full hardware control, enhanced security, and predictable flat-rate pricing.
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horizoniq.com
horizoniq.com › home › blog › ec2 vs ecs vs bare metal: which infrastructure solution is right for you?
EC2 vs ECS vs Bare Metal: Which Infrastructure Solution is Right ...
When should I choose bare metal servers?
Choose bare metal servers when you require maximum performance, full control, higher security, or must meet strict compliance requirements. They are also ideal for long-term, stable workloads.
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horizoniq.com
horizoniq.com › home › blog › ec2 vs ecs vs bare metal: which infrastructure solution is right for you?
EC2 vs ECS vs Bare Metal: Which Infrastructure Solution is Right ...
What is Amazon EC2?
Amazon EC2 is a cloud service providing resizable compute capacity for running virtual machines with flexible configurations, operating systems, and software packages. It’s ideal for applications needing flexibility, scalability, and integration with other AWS services.
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horizoniq.com
horizoniq.com › home › blog › ec2 vs ecs vs bare metal: which infrastructure solution is right for you?
EC2 vs ECS vs Bare Metal: Which Infrastructure Solution is Right ...
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EC2 Pricing Calculator
costcalc.cloudoptimo.com › aws-pricing-calculator › ec2 › i3.metal
i3.metal Pricing and Specs: AWS EC2
Price / 365 DaysN. Virginia ... This instance family features Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-backed storage, optimized for low latency, very high random I/O performance, and high sequential read throughput, offering high IOPS at a cost-effective rate. Additionally, the I3 series includes Bare Metal instances (i3.metal), powered by the Nitro System, for workloads requiring direct access to physical resources or those with licensing constraints.
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AWS re:Post
repost.aws › questions › QU_1KY3bTCQJKsQZRL2kfXnA › metal-instance-pricing-question
Metal instance pricing question | AWS re:Post
July 2, 2024 - Just like ordinary computer because I want to interact with physical processor . What should I choose? Aloocate dedicated host (M7a), on demand which is priced according to pricing calculator 12.241/Hour.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › about-aws › whats-new › 2019 › 05 › amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances-are-now-available-in-additional-aws-regions
Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances are Now Available in Additional AWS Regions
Your profile helps improve your interactions with select AWS experiences. ... M5 bare metal instances are now available in the Canada (Central) region.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/devops › perf/cost comparison of aws vs bare metal offerings?
r/devops on Reddit: Perf/cost comparison of AWS vs bare metal offerings?
September 14, 2014 -

Hey folks,

Our AWS EC2 bill is going up pretty fast and I'm curious to explore other options out there on the market that might give us the best bang for our buck. A good portion of the AWS bill is for traffic, and another one is for the machines themselves. Our system is completely decoupled from Amazon's proprietary offerings, so it should be very straightfoward to move it to any other provider assuming I can set up a few subnets analogous to the VPC.

Now, admittedly we're paying for boxes on hourly basis, and there are big savings to be had from purchasing a year or two of hosting from them, but at the same I suspect the performance I'm getting from non-dedicated hardware, especially when it comes to hosting Postgres, is sub-par.

I'd love to know if you guys have run into studies and price comparisons out there for AWS vs bare metal providers such as SoftLayer.

Any of you had experience moving to bare metal and noticed considerable savings?

Thank you.

Top answer
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This is something that varies greatly by use case, so you're probably on your own. The benefit to AWS really comes from scaling. Figure out what your lowest traffic period requires and reserve instances to accommodate that to get the base costs as low as possible. Then setup auto scaling to increase capacity as required. This is one of those things that's easier said than done, but the more you work inside the AWS framework, the easier it is, but the less portable you've made your site. Trade offs, as always :-) The big variable between AWS and bare metal is that typically you get charged for your Internet usage on a commit/overage basis (ours is 50mbps commit for example) as opposed to AWS where it's strictly by actual usage.
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In the past 3 companies I worked, we found that Amazon was always much more expensive than bare metal per se. But it's cheaper if you want to scale fast and need a CDN. It's not as easy and cheap to manage and build hardware in 5 different locations around the world when you don't have a datacenter everywhere and also take scalability into account. However, that is almost always not the case. We used bare metal everywhere. This allowed us to put our servers as close as possible to our clients. We only used cloud services for stuff like DNS. We also had the idea of using S3, but quickly gotten rid of it when we saw pricing. It was much cheaper to use Route53 to implement anycast and setup Varnish with a lot of RAM to cache all the content for local users. By the way, we were not using SoftLayer or someone else's services. We simply operated in collocation centers with our own hardware. That is even cheaper than renting the hardware, if you can plan your needs for 1-2 years ahead (with taking scalability into account separately). Also, I found that many overvalue Amazon's benefits of scalability. We can just the same add more RAM, better disks or add more CPUs or servers, if we start seeing that we lack resources. What is exactly the issue here, if running 24/7 bare metal server for overcapacity reasons can be actually cheaper than plugging in additional on demand EC2 instances? We're not getting 500x spikes in HTTP requests or anything. Our peak HTTP request rate is 5000 req./s (minimum being 2000) and we handle that just fine, while going to Amazon and scaling as the request rate increases from 2000 to 5000 requests would be very expensive (for many reasons - traffic (yeah, we get very good deals on it, but even low-end providers like Hetzner are giving 20-30 TB of monthly traffic unlimited speed with baseline of 100-200 Mbps for free, whereas in Amazon you would have to pay for every bit your transfer out...), hardware, etc.). By the way, SoftLayer is not going to be cheap... Disclaimer: That's just my 2 cents. But I'm only mentioning why bare metal is better, not worse, because all in all I believe that Amazon should be used only for scaling whereas baremetal for baseline.
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Vantage
instances.vantage.sh › aws › ec2 › m5.metal
m5.metal pricing and specs - Vantage
The m5.metal instance is in the General purpose family with 96 vCPUs, 384 GiB of memory and 25 Gibps of bandwidth starting at $4.608 per hour.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › blogs › aws › category › compute › amazon-ec2-bare-metal
Amazon EC2 Bare Metal | AWS News Blog
Amazon EC2 has launched new M8a instances powered by 5th Generation AMD EPYC processors, offering up to 30% better performance and 19% better price performance compared to M7a instances, along with improved memory bandwidth, networking, and storage capabilities for various general-purpose workloads.
Find elsewhere
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RedSwitches
redswitches.com › home › servers › bare metal gcp vs aws. which one delivers real performance?
Bare Metal GCP Vs AWS. Which One Delivers Real Performance?
July 18, 2025 - AWS gives you three options to buy compute time for a bare metal server on AWS: On-demand: No commitment. You pay hourly. Good for testing or burst workloads. Reserved: Commit for 1 or 3 years. Pay less, but you’re locked in. Spot: Use spare capacity. Lowest price, but AWS can take the instance back any time.
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HorizonIQ
horizoniq.com › home › blog › ec2 vs ecs vs bare metal: which infrastructure solution is right for you?
EC2 vs ECS vs Bare Metal: Which Infrastructure Solution is Right for You? | HorizonIQ
August 28, 2025 - Unpredictable Costs: Although AWS offers solutions to provide cost-saving opportunities, EC2’s on-demand nature often means unpredictable costs month over month. Furthermore, for large deployments, costs can be significantly higher compared to bare metal.
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Aws-pricing
aws-pricing.com › a1.metal.html
a1.metal - Amazon EC2 Instance Type
Costs and pricing for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type a1.metal in AWS locations in which the instance type is available.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › about-aws › whats-new › 2022 › 04 › amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances
Introducing two new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances - AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6a and C6a bare metal instances. M6a and C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz. M6a instances deliver up to 35% better price performance compared to M5a instances, while C6a instances deliver up to 15% better price performance compared to C5a instances, and offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.
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TechTarget
techtarget.com › searchaws › tip › AWS-bare-metal-instances-target-a-niche-market-for-now
AWS bare-metal instances target a niche market -- for now | TechTarget
AWS bare-metal instances stand out in the cloud provider's vast portfolio of compute options, but they'll have to compete against a range of rival offerings in a market that, for now, remains fairl...
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InfoQ
infoq.com › news › 2021 › 02 › aws-ec2-bare-metal-instances
Amazon Announces New Bare Metal EC2 Instances - InfoQ
February 16, 2021 - AWS recently announced new bare metal instances for Amazon EC2. The new M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn instances are already available and can utilize up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › blogs › compute › category › compute › amazon-ec2-bare-metal
Amazon EC2 Bare Metal | AWS Compute Blog
This post courtesy of Siavash Irani, AWS Solutions Architect and Bryan Mareletto, AWS Technical Program Manager AWS recently announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 bare metal Instances. This post provides an overview of launching, setting up, and configuring a Hyper-V enabled host, ...
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Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com › item
Just a friendly reminder that AWS pricing is still insanely high compared to ded... | Hacker News
November 13, 2018 - Also consider that on AWS you pay for traffic on top of that; prices for which is even more insane. 100TB, while free with Hetzner, would cost you somewhere around $9000 on AWS · Unless you're in Germany, Germany, or, perhaps, Germany (or Finland) then you're adding a lot (yes, a lot) of latency ...
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Nestify
nestify.io › blog › aws-vs-vultr-bare-metal-comparison
AWS vs. Vultr Bare Metal: A Comparison of Performance, Pricing, and Support
June 8, 2023 - These instances can be significantly cheaper than on-demand instances but are subject to availability and can be terminated if the spot price exceeds your bid. Storage and Data Transfer: AWS pricing includes charges for various storage services, such as Amazon S3 for object storage, Amazon EBS for block storage, and Amazon Glacier for long-term archival storage. Data transfer between AWS services and regions also incurs additional costs. Vultr offers a more straightforward pricing structure compared to AWS. Here’s an overview of Vultr Bare Metal pricing:
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Vantage
instances.vantage.sh › aws › ec2 › a1.metal
a1.metal pricing and specs - Vantage
The a1.metal instance is in the General purpose family with 16 vCPUs, 32 GiB of memory and up to 10 Gibps of bandwidth starting at $0.408 per hour.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › about-aws › whats-new › 2021 › 11 › amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances
Introducing two new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances
September 10, 2025 - Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6i and C6i bare metal instances are available. M6i and C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 and C5 instances ...