For just (at least these days) reliable metal I would second OVH. I have been running servers there for 15 years, starting with support in French only. They used to have issues but now they are, for me, best bang for my buck: storage, cpu etc for spidering setups, experimenting, non critical heavy experiments etc. I have many servers which went from that kind of status to full prod because of convenience and they have not let me down through several major version debian updates.