The part your missing is that basically all dedicated server hosters are this cheap.
DO, Vultr, AWS, GCP, Azure are the odd ones out and extremely expensive.
The only reason ever not to use dedicated servers is if you're in the bay area and ops wages are so overinflated that you literally can't afford an ops or devops person.
For everyone else on the planet, the comparison between the wage of an ops person, and server costs, is always in favor of dedicated hardware with your own ops people.
The thing I don't understand is why would people consider AWS to have lower "ops" costs?
I can deploy my SaaS either to VPS servers (AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc) or to physical servers. Both deployments use the same ansible automation. The only difference is that I additionally use terraform to set up the cloud instances.
In every case, if a machine fails it is my problem.
Any employee comes with overhead costs ($$ and time and risk). Lots of side projects get off the ground only because people don’t have to cover the fixed quantum of costs that hiring an employee brings.
“If this doesn’t take off, I’m on the hook for ~$100/month when it could have been under $10/month“ just isn’t that compelling.
DO, Vultr, AWS, GCP, Azure are the odd ones out and extremely expensive.
The only reason ever not to use dedicated servers is if you're in the bay area and ops wages are so overinflated that you literally can't afford an ops or devops person.
For everyone else on the planet, the comparison between the wage of an ops person, and server costs, is always in favor of dedicated hardware with your own ops people.