Very little sysadmin needed if you go with a managed dedicated server provider. They pretty much take care of most of that for you. A little more expensive than

Very little sysadmin needed if you go with a managed dedicated server provider. They pretty much take care of most of that for you. A little more expensive than a non-managed dedicated server but oftentimes still much cheaper than the cloud. Plus, you can't really completely get away from sysadmin when working with the cloud either. You actually get a lot less support than you do with a managed dedicated server provider. Note: I heavily use AWS and managed dedicated servers.