I did look at SoftLayer and it's still not significantly cheaper than AWS. Hetzner doesn't seem to have servers in the US, so I've already ruled them out.
Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.
There are probably a lot of alternatives that other people know more about than I do. Just to address a concern with Hetzner: connectivity is really good there. Last time I was in the US, I got better roundtrip times from my German server than I got from MediaTemple gs in California (though they also have some very nice features). Of course there is no going around light speed the limitation, but I'd say for a lot of projects a European server +CloudFlare is totally sufficient. In the end, it's all a tradeoff between different factors ;)
An issue with virtually all dedicated server vendors is the tendency to grossly under-equip servers with memory: My Mac Mini has 16GB (a $100 upgrade), and it is simply ridiculous that going above 4GB on a server is considered some extravagant feature the requires significant, expensive upgrades of every other component.
In VPS, memory is everything. Memory is the # of VMs they can spin up, which is directly proportional to the amount of money they're making. What you're ultimately paying for is memory. Yes, some bandwidth, but mostly memory. It's what hotel rooms are for hotels.
If we were talking about VPS servers, then sure, however we're talking about dedicated servers. What you are renting is a physical box (such as Dell R210s) sitting in a rack somewhere.
Is it possible that they might want to save money by giving you wimpy memory, because they feel that with the 32gb they give you, they could be making a lot more with something like 64 micros?
16GB of ECC memory for servers is a lot more expensive than your Mac Mini's memory. I recently spent £250 on 2x 4GB DIMMs for a Dell Poweredge server[1] (ok DDR2 is older and therefore more expensive, but still). The same configuration for my Mac Mini came in at around £50[2]
You paid a significant premium for that older memory (a funny paradox of the industry). As P1esk mentioned, you could have gotten 32GB for around the same price. Straight from Dell, paying their inflated prices, on a new R210 it's $173 to go to 16GB of ECC memory.
I've bought a number of large servers recently (using owned servers at colocation in combination with virtual hosts for DR and geo-sharding), and always equip them with 192GB or more. The pricing of memory is so incredibly low it makes no sense otherwise, yet all of these dedicated server vendors act as if 2GB is the norm and 4GB is the advanced upgrade.
Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.