Bare Metal vs AWS and GCP in Costa Rica (2026)
June 12, 2026
Xavier Fernández
Director of Infrastructure
Bare metal and colocation in Costa Rica make sense when you need fixed monthly cost, a named jurisdiction, and hardware you control — while AWS and GCP win when you need elastic burst, managed services, or global region sprawl. CR Servers dedicated servers start at $89/month and colocation at $150/month per 1U in rack space at the country's primary telecom carrier facility.
This is not an anti-cloud manifesto. Many workloads belong on hyperscalers. The question is which steady-state production belongs on metal in Costa Rica instead.
When Costa Rica metal beats hyperscaler VMs
| Signal | Favor CR dedicated / colo | Favor AWS / GCP |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly bill predictability | Fixed plan, unmetered bandwidth on VPS/dedicated tiers | Egress, storage class, and instance churn add up |
| Jurisdiction documentation | Costa Rica entity, local laws (7975, 8968) | Region code in console |
| Steady CPU/RAM 24/7 | Dedicated $89–$279/mo tiers | Large reserved instances or always-on EC2 |
| You own the hardware | Colocation from $150/U | Not applicable |
| Support model | Bilingual team in San José | Enterprise support tiers |
Teams that left CR Servers for cloud often cite elasticity — then return when egress invoices, support friction, or compliance questionnaires need a physical footprint they can name.
Cost patterns that surprise cloud migrants
Hyperscaler pricing is competitive at small scale. Pain shows up when:
- Egress charges dominate (media, backups, analytics pipelines)
- Always-on instances run at high utilization — reserved capacity helps but adds contract complexity
- Support for production incidents requires paid tiers
- Compliance needs evidence of location and operator — “us-east-1” is not a legal answer
CR Servers dedicated plans publish monthly prices: $89 (Entry), $179 (Business), $279 (Performance) with 150 Mbps uplink and KVM over IP. No per-GB egress line item on standard unmetered VPS/dedicated positioning — verify your contract for bandwidth upgrades.
Hybrid pattern (common among former whales)
A practical win-back architecture:
- Steady state on dedicated or colocated metal in San José
- Burst / DR on AWS or GCP in a chosen region
- DNS and data classification documented per jurisdiction
CR Servers operated in the same carrier facility for colocation + dedicated — one throat to choke for physical ops.
CR Servers dedicated specs (2026)
| Plan | Monthly | CPU / RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | $89 | Intel up to quad-core, 8 GB RAM | 240 GB SSD |
| Business | $179 | Dual Xeon, 24 GB RAM | 960 GB SSD |
| Performance | $279 | Dual Xeon hexa-core, 96 GB RAM | 1.2 TB SSD |
➡️ Dedicated servers · Colocation
When to stay on AWS / GCP
Stay on hyperscalers when you need:
- Autoscaling for unpredictable traffic
- Managed databases, K8s, or ML platforms as a service
- Many global regions with low-latency anycast
- Short-lived dev/test environments spun up hourly
CR Servers is not competing on feature parity with AWS control planes — we compete on predictable metal, locale, and human operators.
Migration concierge (how we help)
Typical steps when moving from cloud to CR metal:
- Inventory steady-state CPU/RAM/disk — size a dedicated or colo footprint
- Plan DNS cutover and backup windows
- Replicate data to CR Servers VPS or dedicated staging first
- Cut production with rollback DNS TTL planned
Contact sales for workload sizing — no obligation.