If you want to avoid infrastructure complexity, I'd go for dedicated hosting most of the time. Most of my past clients have ended up paying for more hours on operations for AWS setups than for dedicated. AWS and similar tends to force a lot of ceremony, some of which is good, but a lot of which is unnecessary on dedicated setups or on premises setups.

But yes, if your costs per unit are that low, I've typically told clients it largely depends on what they're most comfortable with. Some then pick AWS and it's a perfectly good choice.

What I'm seeing though, is that a lot of people pick AWS without first pricing out the options, and then later end up with expensive migrations to get off it.

Oh if that isn’t a perfect description of AWS I don’t know what is. Every time I look at AWS, that’s what I discover.

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.