I compare cloud to non-cloud VPSes. If you compare them to self-hosting the price is even more biased against cloud, even with current RAM prices. Did you know you can get 40G or 100G dedicated internet to your colo rack for something like $2000 a month (prices vary greatly, YMMV)? Colo only makes sense if you need a fairly large quantity of compute resources, but the per-unit cost can be very good. Every other style of hosting is building on top of it with a profit margin, after all.