Vultr bills bare metal like cloud: every plan carries a metered transfer allowance with $0.01/GB overage and there is no unmetered option at any price - a problem if you serve media. Their cheapest bare-metal box is $120/mo for a 4-core Xeon stocked in 4 regions, and cPanel is a licence you pay for on top. Primcast starts at $5/mo with unmetered ports, and radio and live video running on the same network.
A fine cloud platform - just not built for predictable bandwidth or a control panel.
Three pairings matched on cores, memory and disks - Xeon against Xeon, EPYC against EPYC, with both sides quoted in dollars.
Matching memory and disks, both Intel Xeon, and double the cores for $28.35 a month less. Their 5 TB cap doesn't apply to us, and streaming runs on the same network.
Identical on paper - eight cores, 128 GB, 2× 1.92 TB - and $153.53 a month apart. Their chip runs at a higher clock, but our port has no 10 TB ceiling and streaming costs nothing extra.
AMD EPYC both ways: 24 cores, 256 GB, matching disks, and $282.82 less each month. Ours adds registered ECC, hardware RAID, an unmetered port, and streaming on the same network.
Vultr's plan IDs, specs and pricing were pulled from their public plans API in September 2026, so these are figures they publish themselves. Their allowances pool account-wide and spill over at $0.01/GB, and no plan of theirs can be bought unmetered. The region counts reflect stock at the time we looked. Prices on our side are configurator totals for custom builds, which add a one-time $29 setup fee - EPYC from New York and Bucharest, Xeon from any of the five. Their catalog also lists a 128-core, 2 TB machine, though none was in stock in any region when we looked.
Where the platforms really differ: bandwidth billing, what's in the box, streaming and who you can call.
| Primcast | Vultr Bare Metal | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry bare-metal price | From $5 / mo + $13 setup | From $120.00 / mo - a 4-core Xeon E3-1270 |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered options up to 10 Gbps, never oversold | Metered: 5-10 TB per plan, then $0.01/GB, drawn down hourly |
| Unmetered option | Standard on 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps ports | Not offered at any price |
| cPanel | $49.50/mo add-on (Premier, 100 domains) - or the free ISPConfig panel | Licence billed monthly on top of the server |
| Streaming platform | Radio & live video on the same network - AutoDJ included, up to 5,000 listeners at once and 1.5 million listener hours a month | Not offered - separate provider needed |
| Deployment time | ~30 minutes; custom builds within 24h | Minutes on stocked plans, subject to regional availability |
| Custom hardware | Spec your own CPU, RAM, disks and network - built within 24h | Fixed plan catalog only |
| 24/7 human support | Phone & live chat, included for everyone | Unmanaged; support by ticket and email only |
| Migration help | Free on every plan: planning, rebuilds and the cutover call - how it works | Self-service |
Vultr is built for engineers who want bare metal behind a cloud API and are happy to watch a transfer meter. Primcast is built for people shipping content: unmetered ports with no allowance to blow through - and upgrades up to 10 Gbps on higher-tier servers - radio and live video on the same network with up to 5,000 radio listeners at once, 1.5 million listener hours a month and no per-viewer fees, and real people on the phone 24/7. From $5/mo, with free help moving off Vultr - planning, rebuilds and the cutover call for your sites, workloads and streams.
