I'm so happy we got started back before cloud services were common, so just grew with dedicated servers all along. A couple of times I've tried to price out what we'd pay for similar infrastructure from a cloud provider and the difference is insane. Plus it could never actually offer the same performance we have with servers in the same rack, containing fast CPUs and arrays of gen4 ssds in the same boxes, etc.
Of course it helps that we've grown very gradually over many years, so we don't need to scale rapidly; we can just over-provision by a few times to handle the spikes we do get, and work out tuning and upgrades each time we brush up against bottlenecks. So I'm sure it wouldn't work for everyone. But I bet there are still a lot of startups that would do well to just lease a dedicated box or two.
Of course it helps that we've grown very gradually over many years, so we don't need to scale rapidly; we can just over-provision by a few times to handle the spikes we do get, and work out tuning and upgrades each time we brush up against bottlenecks. So I'm sure it wouldn't work for everyone. But I bet there are still a lot of startups that would do well to just lease a dedicated box or two.