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How it works

Metalhost is bare-metal cloud infrastructure you manage from app.metalhost.net. This page explains the concepts you'll see in the dashboard — orgs, projects, wallets, VMs, bare metal, storage, and networks.

Organizations and projects

Signup creates an organization — your billing boundary. Inside it you work in projects — workspaces that hold VMs, bare-metal leases, disks, SSH keys, and networks. The project picker in the top nav switches your scope; most resources belong to one project.

Projects — create and switch workspaces. Members are org-wide — see Team members.

Wallet and billing

Metalhost is prepaid. Your org's wallet holds a balance; running resources debit it continuously. Top up under billing → overview → top up before creating resources.

  • Hourly (default for VMs) — per-second usage while the VM runs.
  • Monthly prepaid — discounted upfront terms (1–12 months) for VMs and bare metal.

Stopping a VM pauses compute billing; the boot disk still bills at the storage rate. Delete the VM to release everything. Bare-metal leases bill for the hardware even when powered off.

Full billing tabs (usage, invoices, limits): Billing & usage. Funding: Wallet & top-ups.

Regions

VMs and bare-metal hosts live in a datacenter (region). Pick the closest region when creating resources. Resources can't move between regions — create new ones in another DC if you need to relocate.

Virtual machines

Slices of shared hosts — elastic sizing, ~90 second provision. A VM needs a name, region, compute shape, an OS image, and access (SSH keys or password). States: PROVISIONING → RUNNING.

Every VM gets private networking and public IPv6. Public IPv4 is opt-in at create time (~$2/mo).

Bare metal

Whole physical machines leased to your project — no hypervisor. Top nav bare metal. Hourly or prepaid monthly terms; browse inventory, lease a host, manage via BMC console. Leases include unlimited bandwidth (unlike VMs, which meter against a 10 TiB/mo transfer allowance). Best when you need dedicated GPU nodes, fixed specs, or BYO hypervisors.

Bare metal overview · Lease bare metal

Storage

Top nav storage — block disks (NVMe, attach to one VM) and file shares (NFSv4, mount from many VMs in the same project + DC). See Storage.

SSH and access

Register SSH keys under developers → SSH keys, then select them when creating a VM or bare-metal lease. Keys are baked in at first boot via cloud-init. 

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@example.com"

API automation uses API keys on the same developers page.

Networks and firewall

Each project gets a default network per datacenter — see Networks. Firewall rules on the VM detail page control inbound traffic on the public IPv4. When you allocate a public IPv4, SSH (22), HTTP (80), and HTTPS (443) are opened by default.

Support

Top nav support — org-wide tickets for billing, technical issues, and quota increases. Support tickets.

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