It's renting space from someone who is doing that for you.
The scale of cost savings/ownership as you scale kinda goes:
FaaS -> PaaS -> Cloud -> VPS -> Rented Hardware -> Rented space in DC -> Own DC.
Let's avoid conflating everything left of VPS with the most difficult form of it, because nobody is going there from nothing.
It's renting space from someone who is doing that for you.
The scale of cost savings/ownership as you scale kinda goes:
FaaS -> PaaS -> Cloud -> VPS -> Rented Hardware -> Rented space in DC -> Own DC.
Let's avoid conflating everything left of VPS with the most difficult form of it, because nobody is going there from nothing.