Dedicated servers are actually quite cheap. I pay $60/month to run one of my products that services thousands of paying customers across North America (High performance native TCP and UDP based game like servers) and the performance is quite predictable
Indeed the servers can be cheap! The inherited configuration used a redhat image with support that added a premium cost on top of being a slightly beefier server to run a few dozen containers simultaneously for testing. With the configuration change we optimized the choices and dropped support.
That said, it really wasn't much work to drop the 6pm-6am costs to effectively 0 unless a developer decided to work late (it automatically scales up)
