Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS).
https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/
https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml
For a certain scale, aiming at dedicated is probably cheaper, especially when you consider how much faster a dedicated SSD box is than a shared VPS.
The main benefits of AWS (or Azure) are all of the other features they offer on their platform. But I don't think that they are low-cost anymore, especially in today's world with ~$42/month dedicated SSD Xeon servers.