Announcing Resource-Based Pricing for Google Compute Engine
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
There's a massively booming VoIP industry right now (despite the perception of "too many players" in the market). Go out there and make money while providing good affordable service. Charge $10-$15 per line while the big guys ask for $25-$50. VoIP seats add up fast, and it's very nice MRR with not a lot of hassle if you run things right and give customers tools to get things done without calling for support for every little thing.
Or go the route that Dialpad is taking with their limited Free product (dialpad.com/free) which is kind of a bait-and-switch because surely a business will need to convert to a paid subscription of some sort if they don't end up going out of business in the first few months.
This is a bit confusing, as "bare metal" is usually used as a contrast to virtualization, although it I suppose it could mean "not cloud" (but further muddled by AWS offering "bare metal" instance types).
More importantly, though, if you're thinking of some kind of VPS provider, where you'd dynamically allocate and de-allocate servers from their inventory, there's no reason you couldn't run directly on the hardware with no hypervisor.
Virtualization is only strictly necessary for multi-tenancy, such as if you need to allocate only half of a server.
I'm not sure how you get one from the other.
Assuming you mean a pay-as-you-use scheme that merely charges a modest premium over the traditional model of paying up front, it's tough to see why it would be attractive for a provider. What their cost for the hardware or bandwidth happens to be wouldn't make much difference, since they have to pay it regardless.
A pay-as-you-use scheme that charges a huge premium, such as a multiple of the providers cost, on the other hand, could be quite attractive, as evidenced by what cloud providers do.
Start with a dedicated hosting provider until you build up a user base.
Then when you need extreme bandwidth, Hurricane Electric is the affordable way to go.
For $400/month, you can host your own servers up to 15 amps/rack and get 1 Gbps sustained (you can likely negotiate for more bw.) Their remote-hands is free and expert enough.