I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses.

That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.