Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a one off install fee of £75.

At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud, they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power. Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about £1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't too terrible.

I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy and over the years it saved a fortune.