> hire a freelance DBA to check in on the servers once a day
Not sure whether you were just interested in the author's specific freelancer but--
The term for this is "Remote DBA" and there are lots of them. I suppose the difficult part is confirming trustworthiness and skills before giving them direct access to your database.
> Now we are renting our own hardware and maintain the database. We have a lot better hardware than any of the cloud service providers could offer
Which provider are you using?
> That 30% we can use to hire a freelance DBA to check in on the servers once a day.
Where did you find this freelancer?