It does seem to be. We are relatively small, and admittedly have a whole bunch of data in S3, but aside from that, our $10K/mo at Rackspace (primarily VMs, some load balancing) is looking to go down to about $6K/month at AWS when we port across 40 or so VMs (then we also don't have to deal with $4K/mo of S3 data transfer, too).
Definitely true. I've actually only been with this company five weeks as their Ops guy, so these are questions I need to get answers too - the founder freely admits Rackspace was his first choice due to good history. But AWS is probably a better fit for us, so I'm doing due diligence on all that. Dedicated is probably not going to work for us at least initially. But definitely worth investigation too.
As far as I can tell it's 5 times the cost of digital ocean.