Cherry Servers
European bare metal cloud with real open source tooling. Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and a CLI — all open and permissively licensed, with no proprietary lock-in.
What Makes It FOSS-Friendly
Cherry Servers is a Lithuanian bare metal and cloud provider that backs its open source claims with code. They maintain a genuinely useful set of open source tooling on GitHub — a Terraform provider, an Ansible collection, a Kubernetes cloud-controller-manager, Go and Python SDKs, and the cherryctl CLI — all under permissive licenses (MIT, MPL-2.0, Apache-2.0). That means you can provision and manage infrastructure entirely from open tools, with no proprietary control panel in your way.
They offer an unusually broad range of operating systems, including FreeBSD and Arch Linux — distributions that many providers don't support. Their API-first approach means automation is a first-class citizen, not an afterthought bolted onto a web dashboard.
Cherry Servers ships an official Terraform provider, Ansible collection, Kubernetes CCM, and cherryctl CLI on GitHub under permissive licenses. If you live in infrastructure-as-code, your whole workflow is supported out of the box.
Setup & Management
You can deploy through the Cherry Panel web console or entirely via the REST API. Instant bare metal servers are provisioned automatically in roughly 3 to 20 minutes, while custom-spec machines take 24 to 72 hours. For repeatable infrastructure, the Terraform provider and Ansible collection are the path of least resistance — define your servers, networks, and SSH keys as code and apply.
The cherryctl CLI handles day-to-day management from your terminal (it installs via a Homebrew tap), and the Go/Python SDKs let you script anything the API exposes. Kubernetes users can wire clusters in with the official cloud-controller-manager for native load balancer and node integration.
- REST API + cherryctl CLI
- Terraform provider and Ansible collection
- Kubernetes cloud-controller-manager
- Instant servers in 3–20 min; custom in 24–72h
Caveats & Gotchas
Cherry Servers sits in the mid-range on price — you are paying for European bare metal and good tooling, not rock-bottom budget VPS rates. If your only metric is dollars per gigabyte of RAM, budget providers will undercut them.
Bare metal provisioning for custom configurations is not instant; plan for up to 72 hours if you need non-standard hardware. Managed services beyond infrastructure (managed databases, backups, etc.) are limited, so expect to run and back up your own stack. As a mid-sized provider, they are less battle-tested at very large scale than the hyperscalers.
Pricing Tiers
Cloud VPS S
From €4.99/mo1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD
Best for: Lightweight services, personal projects
Cloud VPS M
From €14.99/mo2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD
Best for: Web apps, Docker, development
Bare Metal
From €0.084/hrDedicated Xeon/EPYC servers, billed hourly or fixed-term
Best for: Heavy workloads, Kubernetes nodes, dedicated performance
Verdict
Recommended if…
You want European bare metal with first-class open source automation tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes), value an API-first provider, or need dedicated performance without proprietary lock-in.
Avoid if…
You need the cheapest possible VPS, require instant provisioning of custom-spec bare metal, or want extensive managed services beyond raw infrastructure.