Bare Metal Server
A bare metal server is a physical machine rented or owned whole, with no hypervisor between your workload and the hardware. One tenant gets every core, all the memory and the full network interface. Performance is predictable because nothing else on the box competes for it, and capacity is fixed because nothing else can be started beside it.
Also called
Bare-metal
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What Does a Bare Metal Server Cost a Multiplayer Game?
A bare metal server is priced by the month. The rent is the same whether the host runs matches all day or sits empty overnight, so what counts is the cost of each hour it is busy.
That makes utilization the variable that decides the bill. Player demand typically peaks in the evening, local time, and falls overnight. A host sized for the peak sits partly idle the rest of the day, and idle hours cost the same as busy ones. A host sized for the quietest hours stays busy around the clock. Then it usually costs less per hour than on-demand capacity.
Bandwidth shifts the comparison further. Bare metal rentals usually include it, up to an allowance set in the contract, while cloud providers bill network egress per GB. For a game server sending state to every player many times a second, that line adds up.
Lower monthly rates also come with longer commitments, often 12 months. The rate is locked in. So is the capacity.
In Practices - Insights from Edgegap's Blog
Article's key insights
Bare metal servers are solely owned (or rented) dedicated computing servers, whose main draw for game developers are cost savings.
Bare metal servers cost savings versus cloud servers come into two forms: 1. the costs of compute itself which can be by up to 50% and, 2. the bandwidth costs (often called “egress”) by over 90% compared to traditional cloud platforms.
Bandwidth (egress) costs often catch developers off guard, accounting for 25-35% of cloud bills for successful multiplayer games.
Main challenges include capacity planning difficulties, financial commitment risks, and taking on full infrastructure management responsibilities.
Edgegap's Private Fleet solution offers hybrid orchestration; combining bare metal cost savings with cloud burst capability for traffic spikes.
How Is a Bare Metal Server Different From a Cloud Server?
A cloud server is a virtual machine: a hypervisor splits a physical host among tenants, and capacity starts and stops on request. Bare metal hands you the whole host. For game servers, the difference that matters most is how capacity behaves.
Amount. Adding bare metal means ordering another host, which takes hours to days rather than minutes. A launch bigger than planned has to be absorbed somewhere else.
Place. Bare metal exists only where you rented it. Cloud servers start wherever the provider has capacity, which matters when players show up somewhere unexpected.
Price shape. Bare metal costs the same every month. Cloud is billed while it runs, at a higher hourly rate.
Both are sound homes for a game server, chosen for different objectives. Fortnite runs "almost completely" on AWS (DatacenterDynamics, February 2023), while many persistent worlds run on reserved hosts. A container image runs the same way on either, so a game can move between them, or use both.
Who Runs a Bare Metal Server?
Renting bare metal gets you a machine, not a hosting platform. The operating system, security updates, monitoring, replacing failed hosts, and the orchestration that starts and stops a game server for each match are all yours.
Studios that run it themselves usually build that layer from open-source tools, and it works at scale. At KubeCon 2023, Ubisoft presented 25,000 servers managed with Talos, a Linux distribution built for Kubernetes (our analysis of open source on bare metal, October 2024). It also takes a platform team, and that team belongs in the cost per hour as much as the rent.
Managed bare metal moves that layer to the provider. Edgegap's Private Fleet reserves dedicated hosts in 58 locations (platform data, 18 September 2026), with egress included. Edgegap maintains the operating system, updates and monitoring, and orchestrates game servers onto the hosts (private fleet documentation). When the fleet is full, deployments overflow to Edge Cloud, billed per minute.
When Does a Bare Metal Server Fit a Game?
When its load is steady enough to keep a host busy. Three patterns tend to be:
Persistent worlds. A server that never shuts down is load that never drops. The Isle runs on Edgegap's Private Fleet.
The baseline of match-based games. Even a game with sharp evening peaks runs some matches at every hour. That floor can keep a host busy all day.
Specific hardware. A reserved host lets a studio pick the exact machine, such as a high clock speed for a large simulation. See vCPU.
Load above the floor, such as peaks, launches and players far from the fleet, is where cloud capacity usually comes in. Running both under one orchestrator is hybrid orchestration. Where the line sits differs for every game, and it moves as the game grows.
A word from our sponsor (ourselves!)
Private Fleets give you dedicated bare-metal compute in 58 locations for persistent, cost-effective, egress-free hosting. When your player base spikes, Edge Cloud automatically absorbs the overflow on demand, keeping online performance steady wherever your players are.
Edgegap's Take (just our opinion, take it with a grain of salt!)
Bare Metal Is a Utilization Decision
Cloud versus bare metal is often argued as a contest between two kinds of machine. For a game server, it is mostly about how busy each machine stays.
At our published rates, a Private Fleet host costs $0.0282 per vCPU-hour on a 12-month commitment, and Edge Cloud costs $0.00115 per vCPU-minute on demand, or $0.069 per vCPU-hour (platform data, 18 September 2026). The reserved host costs less once it is busy about 41% of the time, roughly 10 hours a day, before counting the egress it includes.
The second lever is how full each server is, and the debate tends to skip it. A half-full match uses the same server time as a full one, on bare metal or in the cloud. Filling matches, and packing them onto hosts, lowers the cost per player on both.
So we read the demand curve before the contract: a reserved baseline for the hours a game is reliably busy, cloud above it, full matches on both. Some games fill a host all day. Fortnite runs almost entirely in the cloud. The studio's objectives decide.
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