What benefit would they get from using cloud? A lot more money for much worse performance. It's like buying a monthly bus pass when you could buy a Honda Civic

What benefit would they get from using cloud? A lot more money for much worse performance. It's like buying a monthly bus pass when you could buy a Honda Civic for less. Despite what Cloud providers want you to think, scaling (for most of us) is largely an architecture, design and software issue and it tends to be rather specific to your system (until you get to the point where you have to build your own). "Auto-scaling" doesn't help you make sure you aren't opening too many forking connections to your database, it doesn't eliminate coarse locks, un-optimized system calls, making sure you take advantage of cache locality, sharding, denormalization or really anything that requires effort. The game changes a bit with the SaaS stuff that PaaS vendors are selling (dynamodb, for example), but then you pay a lock-in price.