Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.

There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.

You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.