Bare metal is priced like it always was but is mad convenient now. latitude.sh is my favorite, but there are a bunch of providers that are maybe a little less polished.

It's also way faster to deploy and easier to operate now. And mad global, I've needed to do it all over the world (a lot of places the shit works flawlessly and you can get Ryzen SKUs for nothing).

Protip: burn a partition of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS which is the default on everything and use that as "premium IPMI", even if you run Ubuntu. you can always boot into a known perfect thing with all the tools to tweak whatever. If I have to even restart on I just image it, faster than launching a VM on EC2.