Before purchasing and installing your own server, I would try out a bare metal server from a company like OVH for a couple months. You'll get a better sense of the additional setup steps necessary (as compared with a VPS) without buying hardware or committing to a collocation contract.
I've learned a ton (and saved a bunch of money) transitioning from EC2, RDS, and Elastic Cloud to a single OVH dedicated server running Proxmox to host multiple VMs.
I've learned a ton (and saved a bunch of money) transitioning from EC2, RDS, and Elastic Cloud to a single OVH dedicated server running Proxmox to host multiple VMs.