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The box is cheap.The job is not.
A VPS for a few euros a month can run a website and its mail, and the setup takes an afternoon. What the invoice does not show is the on-call job that starts the day it is up.
What you get
The whole stack is yours, down to the kernel. Nothing is rented except the metal.
No per-seat pricing. Ten mailboxes cost the same as one.
You know exactly where the machine is, because you chose it.
What it costs
You are the on-call engineer. The 03:00 bounce, the failed certificate, the full disk: all of them are yours.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are things you configure, rotate, and monitor, with no one to check your work.
IP reputation is earned slowly and lost in a week of misconfiguration, and there is no support line to call when it is gone.
Backups, patching, and failover exist only to the extent that you built them.
Where we differ
The machine is provisioned, hardened, and patched on a schedule you are told about in advance.
The 99.9% quarterly SLA is in the terms, with a stated remedy when it is missed.
A named person is on call, and the status page publishes whether they are reachable.
Pick them when
You enjoy the work and want to learn the stack from the inside.
The workload is a project, not a dependency the business runs on.
You already have a senior sysadmin whose time is not being spent on this.
Pick us when
The mail has to arrive and the site has to be up while you do the actual business.
You would rather buy the outcome than own the pager.
Not sure which one you are?
Open a brief and say what you have today. If the honest answer is that nothing should change, that is a valid result and you will get it in writing.