[WhiteOwlLion]

Some businesses don't have IT staff or technical individuals, so cloud ends up being this nebulous resource that just works. Dedicated server means you are comfortable setting up your own servers to some extent. I agree with the comments thus far, you just need to be one of the technical people to appreciate the difference between cloud vs dedicated.

[vidarh]

If it's one thing cloud services does not do, it is "just work". Companies lacking IT staff is a bonanza for devops consultants.

The difference is minimal these days, but usually my experience is that people spend more on devops for AWS. If you want to spin up a dedicated host at e.g. Hetzner or OVH or Softlayer or wherever, it generally take no more or less effort or technical skills than spinning up an instance at AWS. Many of the hosting providers have API's, just like AWS, only they expose their bare metal instead of hypervisor interfaces.

You don't typically need to know any more about the hardware on those systems than you need to know about the virtualized hardware on AWS.