That's slightly surprising to me, unless you were limiting yourself to a particular geographic market for colo that was unusually supply-constrained at the time. (The SFBA during certain years comes to mind).

Sometimes rented servers, for a specific use case (or if the provider is overstocked on a particular model) are a great deal, but I've never seen that at the high-performance end of the spectrum, if they even offer such a model in the first place.

For the average and middle-performance cases, though, for truly comparable servers and connectivity (internal and external, which can be tough to find in the first place), I found rented servers to be moderately more expensive than colo plus buying hardware amortized over 3 years [1].

> and way more troublesome

This one, is the mystery of my life. You mention "magic smoke" downthread, but I've only experienced that once in my entire career and that was with proprietary hardware 2 decades ago.

Conversely, my experience with rented servers is that when there is a hardware problem, other than obvious failure of a replaceable part, "troublesome" doesn't begin to describe it.

[1] yes, including all the costs like installation/rack/stack, network ports, spares, etc. They're not de minimis, but it's maybe a few extra percentage points on the overall cost.