Meanwhile, you also get to contend with noisy neighbors causing the CPU steal, exhausting disk, ram & network I/O, and similar depredations, all while being at

Meanwhile, you also get to contend with noisy neighbors causing the CPU steal, exhausting disk, ram & network I/O, and similar depredations, all while being at the mercy of a help desk that is often less responsive than a server you control yourself. Or you can pay significantly less and get way more dedicated resources if your amenable to a monthly billing model and not using the ability to scale way up and scale way down to control infrastructure costs in the cloud.