Noooooo. Equinix Metal was one of the only places I could get by-the-hour machines with actual HDDs, NVMe and High Speed Networking, in multiple on demand for a day at a time. I use this for example for performance testing or situational testing of Ceph for example, where I need realistic actual hardware especially including HDDs, to match real world environments.

They had a lot of problems though, which didn't matter for me as much, but probably hurt for other people. For example there were no security groups and thus it was somewhat painful to not just expose your entire machine to the internet, without setting up your own linux based router. This is partly because the idea was you would interconnect with an Equinix Fabric (their virtual networking product) which sortof makes sense except you can't just deploy that without a sales contract and the cost of that would outweigh the cost I spent on the machines.

This sucks for me. But that doesn't surprise me given that I'm obviously not a profitable use case in isolation, I was just riding on the coat tails of their other business, and that mostly they were likely largely competing with cloud providers at this point which are better developed/more advanced.

There are other cheap data centre hardware providers but usually not by the hour, if they are don't do L2-adjacent 10-40Gbe networking and almost universally no one has HDDs anymore. I know, I'm a weird use case :)

RIP.

RIP Packet.net, they had an Atom server you could try with Docker Cloud, now both defunct. Good times.