Digital Ocean is a far better alternative if you don't want to use the other bigger cloud providers, quite frankly. AWS dedicated servers are also far less expensive and you get more bang for the buck. m4.2xlarge, for example, is the most comparable hourly offering based on memory and CPU cores to SL base dedicated server and outperforms the hell out of it. See here:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/dedicated-inst...

http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers%20

One success story is not enough compared to thousands elsewhere.