what i think most of people are not getting about cloud providers is that you can surely get better deal out of your money if you go to bare metal, but what you will miss out is a lot of services that come with AWS and that you would end up provision and maintain (e.g. S3, cloudfront). If you are a large business that can afford certain upfront costs to setup certain services cloud services might not be the best place, but for pretty much everyone I think you get a very simplified environment to start your business.