Equinix Metal vs phoenixNAP
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Equinix Metal and phoenixNAP.
Quick Verdict
1.5/5
Equinix Metal
0 reviews
3.9/5
phoenixNAP
0 reviews
phoenixNAP 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. phoenixNAP offers on-demand bare metal servers, colocation, and IaaS in Phoenix, Ashburn, Atlanta, Amsterdam, and Singapore. HIPAA-compliant infrastructure available. From $100/month.
Equinix Metal Discontinued: on-demand bare metal (formerly Packet), sunset 30 June 2026 | phoenixNAP Bare metal cloud in North America and Europe | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 1.5 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | Free tier available | From $38.81/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. | Teams that need dedicated-server performance with cloud-style hourly provisioning — CI/CD fleets, game servers, database nodes, and Kubernetes on bare metal in the US, EU, or Singapore |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 4 vCPU |
| RAM | — | 16 GB |
| Storage | — | 480 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | 15 TB/mo |
| SLA uptime | — | 100% |
| Data-center count | — | 6 |
| €/vCPU/mo | — | €9.70 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | — | €2.43 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | Phoenix, Ashburn, Chicago, Seattle, Amsterdam, Singapore |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | hourly billingipv6ddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi accessprivate networking | hourly billingnvme storageipv6ddos protectionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi access |
| Visit Equinix Metal → | Visit phoenixNAP → | |
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
phoenixNAP
Pros
- + Dedicated physical hardware provisioned in about a minute via API, CLI, or Terraform
- + Transparent pricing: hourly billing, published per-instance rates, $0.01/GB bandwidth overage
- + 15 TB bandwidth and 20 Gbps DDoS protection included; 20/50 Gbps bonded network ports
- + Network depth: BYO IPv4/IPv6, BGP local and global, Anycast, Netris VPC-like networking
- + Concrete SLAs — 100% power/network target with service credits, defined hardware replacement terms
Cons
- - Only six BMC deployment locations despite a larger company network footprint
- - Entry s0.d1.small runs a Haswell-era Xeon E3-1240v3; modern instances cost several times more
- - No snapshots, no included backups, no resizing — scaling means redeploying
- - Public IPv4 allocations billed separately and reserved instances keep billing after deletion
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