If VPS/cloud costs too much for you, try renting dedicated (bare metal) servers. There are lots of options out there, from tiny RPi-type boards all the way to multi-CPU behemoths. You don't need to bear the upfront cost, you're not on the hook for replacing faulty parts down the road, and the total cost of rental over ~5 years isn't massively different from the cost of buying, colocating, and fixing your own hardware.
I know someone who rents a 3990X monster for less than $1K/mo. Renting comparable compute capacity from any well-known VPS/cloud provider would cost at least 10 times as much. I also know someone who rents a cluster of servers with several large disks, pushing hundreds of TB of outbound transfer, again for less than $1K/mo. The bandwidth alone would cost many times as much on AWS, not to mention the storage. Of course you'd be missing the redundancy of AWS, but whether you really need it for your specific use case is your decision to make. Anyway, the point is that most of the savings are realized in the move from VPS/cloud to bare metal, not in the move from rental to colo.
I know someone who rents a 3990X monster for less than $1K/mo. Renting comparable compute capacity from any well-known VPS/cloud provider would cost at least 10 times as much. I also know someone who rents a cluster of servers with several large disks, pushing hundreds of TB of outbound transfer, again for less than $1K/mo. The bandwidth alone would cost many times as much on AWS, not to mention the storage. Of course you'd be missing the redundancy of AWS, but whether you really need it for your specific use case is your decision to make. Anyway, the point is that most of the savings are realized in the move from VPS/cloud to bare metal, not in the move from rental to colo.