In my opinion, this is the optimal solution. You can either host your server in the data center, or you can rent a server, depending on your requirements. When you are running your own dedicated server, you have complete control of the environment, and you can tweak the server as you need to.

In this situation, nested virtualization is used. First, the ESXi hypervisor is installed on the physical server and then you create several other virtual machines that will be used to host your virtual ESXi servers.

The advantages of using a dedicated server in a data center are as follows:

• You have complete control of the servers
• There is no need for any additional physical network infrastructure because everything is virtualized
• It can be cheap for short-term projects
• You will have sufficient compute resources

The disadvantage of using a dedicated server in a datacenter is that it can be cheap for long-term projects.

There are many service providers that you can use to rent a physical server. I tend to use servers from OVH (https://www.ovh.com).