How did they do so?
I had previously thought that dedicated servers were doomed to be too expensive/heavy weight for me. I also felt like most VPS providers charged too much (especially true in the case of AWS -- $10/mo for a t2.micro is ridiculous).
I first found INIZ (http://iniz.com/) and was super happy with them, then someone introduced me to Hetzner Robot Marketplace and I was blown away by the affordable prices (+/- setup fee) and have had one ever since. Hetzner also has a cloud offering that is also pretty great -- slight limits on operating system choice and some other features and you can have very competitively priced machines in a more cloud-friendly fire-up-and-go format.
I wrote about the revelation here (including link to HN thread where it happened): https://vadosware.io/post/fresh-dedicated-server-to-single-n...
Now I have a ~6 Core (12 vCore/hyper-thread) 24GB RAM monster that I can run experiments with for a decent monthly price.
If you go to other providers like Packet, OVH or Amazon, you're going to see way higher prices -- I'm don't have too many requirements so Hetzner worked for me.