You can always rent dedicated hardware – much cheaper than renting similar amounts of virtual servers, and the same administration and operations costs. It’s often even significantly cheaper than what GCE offers – but of course, setting up Kubernetes is more complicated.
If you are a small startup looking to validate market fit, your best bet is Cloud + Kubernetes. If you are an established business with millions of daily customers and serious IT headcount budget, you may look into roll-your-own. The best orchestrator at that scale is, again, Kubernetes.
For a startup, building a datacenter isn’t required in the beginning.
I meant, literally renting existing hardware, in an existing datacenter. This is just a single step from renting VMs at AWS or GCE, but already improves costs significantly.
Edit: got user names wrong
I've deployed a handful of servers automatically myself this way, and I'm still a student.
Saving about an order of magnitude in terms of costs, gaining flexibility, and the only additional work is so low that it costs a compsci student half an hour once (aka ~10€ in wages) — there's no reason not to do it.