Just did some research. Turns out there is a combo of physical servers and cloud-style provisioning/pricing: it's called bare metal clouds. Gotta watch it as some say that but are virtual. Here's one I found that's physical:<p><a href="http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers" rel="nofollow">http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers</a><p>The physical separation is a prerequisite for any real security as you need control over what executes in the box and definitely don't want untrusted processes sharing resources outside of what's already in TCB. Combining a rapid-provisioning, paid-hourly, physical hosting solution with strong privacy policies (e.g. MyKolab's) and terms of service backed by contract would be <i>an awesome offing</i> for a niche market.<p>The niche, off top of head, is essentially two groups: (a) people needing temporary and/or scalable resources for operation on private data; (b) people wanting steady, scalable, private servers who don't want to go all out on running their own. Category (b) would put the physical cloud in competition with with dedicated, hosting market. Potential advantages are manageability, scaling, cost reduction due to pay-per-use, and integration with popular cloud tech (eg Docker) pre-installed on that server. So, anyone looking for a business plan to submit to YCombinator feel free to do an assessment of this market as I think it has potential. The existence of the above company confirms that but I can't say how big this niche is.