I think it is really worth being aware of Hetzner's Dedicated server offerings. What you get isn't that dissimilar to what a cloud provider would offer, but you get about an order of magnitude more compute resources for the same price.

Plus you get better disk access speed (NVMe) than something like an AWS EBS-backed instance. You can also order new instances within a matter of minutes.

You don't have to use them, but being aware of what is available there would be a really good idea. I think some workloads could easily be deployed there at a fraction of the cost of a cloud provider.