I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?

Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.

While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.

Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.

Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.

I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...

It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management.

There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.

I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it.

API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.

If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.

If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.