As an operations employee, I'm shocked you've run thousands of servers in some kind of service while talking yourself out of any operations employees. An operations hire is not a prerequisite to moving past dedicated; even with nothing but 200 dedicated servers you are way past the point of needing at least minimal operations. Contract this out if you have to.

We are not a direct cost center that can be discussed in those terms. Our insight will reduce capital and operational expenditure beyond our salary, because that operations hire would have told you how insane of an idea paying $22,000/mo for four cabinets of gear is and why a capital tradeoff with depreciation is a fiduciary responsibility to your investors and shareholders. You can buy at least a dozen U for that each month and then pay for nothing but where it lives with a dash of break-fix to taste.

I can put four cabinets of gear in a colocation for a quarter or less than that if you'd swing a little capital. You are wasting money on poor operations architecture and design and you don't have anybody to really tell you.

Even beyond that operations is a skill, much like marketing. I know a lot of people think they can fake it for a while (and they usually can), but after a point it's time to act like a grown up company and bring someone who does nothing but think about this shit on board. Security, performance, remediation, all the system level grunt work you shouldn't be concerning yourself with as engineers. Or you can keep throwing multiple operations salaries at your four cabinet OVH deal and keep getting ripped off.