Equinix Metal vs DataPacket
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Equinix Metal and DataPacket.
Quick Verdict
1.5/5
Equinix Metal
0 reviews
3.9/5
DataPacket
0 reviews
DataPacket is rated higher (3.9 vs 1.5). Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) offered on-demand bare metal servers across Equinix metros with ARM and x86 hardware, hourly billing and private interconnects to cloud providers. Equinix stopped commercial sales and sunset the service on 30 June 2026 — it can no longer be purchased or used. DataPacket offers dedicated servers and bare metal across 35 datacenter locations globally. Custom hardware, BGP sessions available, and 100Gbps uplinks on premium servers.
Equinix Metal Discontinued: on-demand bare metal (formerly Packet), sunset 30 June 2026 | DataPacket Global bare metal with 67 datacenter locations | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 1.5 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | Free tier available | From $240/mo |
| Best for | Nobody — the service was sunset on 30 June 2026. Former Metal workloads belong on a modern bare metal provider from our /category/bare-metal-cloud shortlist, or on Equinix colocation if interconnection was the real dependency. | Network-intensive operators — CDNs, video and streaming platforms, VPN providers, game-traffic and mirror hosts — whose costs are driven by bandwidth volume |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | hourly billingipv6ddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi accessprivate networking | nvme storageipv6ddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit Equinix Metal → | Visit DataPacket → | |
Equinix Metal
Pros
- + Historically one of the strongest developer surfaces in bare metal: API, CLI, Terraform, Kubernetes integrations
- + Hourly on-demand billing (minimum one-hour block) with 5-50% reservation discounts by term
- + Single-tenant hardware with real interconnection: Equinix Fabric links and cloud on-ramps
- + ARM and x86 options, NVMe storage, up to 64-core EPYC-class machines
- + Shutdown was handled professionally: dated timeline, migration support, security and stability maintained to the end
Cons
- - Discontinued: sales stopped and the service was sunset on 30 June 2026 — unpicked workloads were deleted
- - Premium pricing (~$535/mo entry per third-party trackers) in a market with far cheaper bare metal automation
- - Classic vendor-concentration risk: a side product inside a colocation giant, killed by portfolio arithmetic
- - Residual resources (IPs, VLANs, VRFs, Fabric connections, dedicated ports) kept billing unless explicitly deleted
- - No free tier, no published SLA; enterprise sales-led motions for credits and reservations
DataPacket
Pros
- + Unshared 50-200 Gbps uplinks with unmetered traffic and no egress billing
- + 67 data centre locations on six continents on a private 330+ Tbps backbone
- + Current-generation AMD EPYC + NVMe + DDR5 hardware, in-stock machines deploy in about a day
- + DDoS Shield included, one IPv4 free per server, free /64 IPv6 blocks
- + Network-heavy reference customers (Discord, bunny.net, Nodecraft, Livepeer) validate traffic-spike resilience
Cons
- - $240/mo entry price excludes small and hobby workloads entirely
- - No cloud platform services: no snapshots, managed databases or autoscaling groups
- - Custom hardware, BYO IP and top uplink tiers are quote-only through sales
- - Thin third-party documentation and community content outside the company's own support
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