[Feld0]

OVH specializes in dedicated servers (https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/) but they offer an API for ordering them and can deliver many of them within a couple of minutes. They have a number of "cloud"/managed offerings as well if you browse around their site. They have datacentres in France and Canada, and are currently bringing up new ones in the US, Australia, and Singapore that they hope to launch by the end of the year. I've been a customer for >3 years now and have been very pleased with their service and support.

OP mentioned a desire to work with bare metal/do IaaS their own way, and dedicated server providers are awesome for that. Conversations about infrastructure are often about "cloud vs. running our own datacentres!" and renting dedicated servers is an interesting middle ground - you get a ton of hardware and bandwidth for your dollar and maintaining the hardware isn't your problem. You give up per-hour billing but you could very well still save money - it's a serious alternative to VPS providers like DigitalOcean.

[kyriakos]

Had good experiences with OVH, their offerings are stable and their support is good. You can talk to an actual human even if you just have a single server.

[nixgeek]

Bear in mind for the first ~90 days you won't be able to get servers from an API call within "120 seconds" (marketing fluff) because they'll hold each order for manual approval. Recent and still very frustrating pains for me!

[candiodari]

They also have their cheaper branch www.kimsufi.com, lower specs, still dedicated.

And you still wouldn't believe the speed difference of a low atom with a VPS, even if the VPS is running on a xeon. Goes double for tail latency.

[jonatron]

Also the uptime on my kimsufi is 530 days, you're unlikely to get that with a VPS, or 'cloud instance'.

[petercooper]

I wondered about that as I have tons of VPSes - the highest was in the 300s. My Hetzner server, though, 1389 days and counting!