> Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud
So are CPUs more or less expensive in the cloud?
Also I assume by "cloud offerings" you mean AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and the like, and by "regular hosting providers" you mean GoDaddy, BlueHost and the like? Or perhaps you mean Paas vs Saas offerings?
If you are interested in what 1/100th of AWS price looks, have a look at Online's server order page for example [1].
Most of the providers like Hetzner/OVH provide former, while GCE provides the latter. I'm not saying it's bad, in fact for most of the people 1Gbps would be more than enough. But it's not something that is fair to omit.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Google, just from my experience.
I am sure Hetzner would be able to offer the same as an add-on if you contacted them directly.
That being said, you would continue to pay orders of magnitude less for your bandwidth then you would at Google or AWS. There's a bubble in cloud bandwidth pricing, and I don't think it's value-related.
What i don't understand is the network cost factor of x100 to x1000
To a first approximation, CPU and RAM are required to get your site up and running at all. Bandwidth is less so. Bandwidth scales up as your growth scales up.
So it makes sense for cloud providers to make CPU and RAM relatively cheap, and charge unreasonable prices for bandwidth. If you're growing, you're more inclined to pay, since you're seeing success. Plus you're already locked in at that point.
Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud, but network are close to 100 times. Any hosting provider will offer you a 250 mbps unlimited network access for your macine, whereas consumming that much bandwidth in google cloud for a month will cost you more than 1000$.
How come is the difference that big ?