Are there places to host an independent bare-metal box where the internet provider for that box is more reliable than cloudflare?
Given the price and performance difference between bare-metal and everything else, I am puzzled as to why small businesses that do not need scalability do not go with bare metal. And given the speeds of todays hardware, if you are not doing something stupid and you have a B2B SaaS, it's really difficult to need "scalability" beyond several bare-metal servers.
To be clear, I do not consider my bare-metal boxes "reliable", I have a multi-server setup managed by ansible, with a distributed database, and I can take a single-node failure without problems. I also have a staging setup that can be converted to production quickly, and a terraform setup that can quickly spin up a Digital Ocean cluster if needed.
My Internet goes down at least twice a year and my electricity goes down even more, specially in the winter. So no, this is not more reliable than cloudflare.
Note that your home network could be good enough for a personal web site that nobody pays you to respect a SLA on.
Unless you have fallback with multi cloud deployments.
You seem to imply that the options are only cloudflare or your apartment. This simply isn't true: there are a plethora of companies that will lease you a dedicated box of some Us in one of their racks, as the sibling commenter replies. Alternatively, you can search for co-location services. Options range from 1U/2U co-location, to half rack units, to full racks, to dedicated areas of the datacentre ranging from cages to whole rooms (I've been in at least one datacentre where an entire room was under separate access control and leased to one customer only).
Usually datacentres are located quite strategically. For example the location of many datacentres in Zürich corresponds with two separate power supply grids that meet (so they can pull from both).
Some of the companies involved are resellers and don't actually operate the datacentres they use. Others actually do. Usually the service is more or less the same, from the point of view of renting a 1U, or co-locating one.
If you want reliability features of a datacentre, e.g. for your office services, but might move, you may find your local city surprising. In Manchester, UK, there's a large amount of dark fibre under the city (fibre that is laid, but not in use), owned by some of the DC companies. Sometimes you can connect your office to said datacentre via dedicated fibre.
Like what exactly?