The use case is different. For the price of a cloud instance, on top of the instance itself, you are paying for:
* availability. On AWS, you can start a couple dozens or hundreds of instances on demand, for a limited time. You are paying for that spare capacity. VPS/Dedicated servers generally have much lower spare capacity, and you're booking things by the month, not by the minute.
* reliability. Most real cloud instances live on networked drives, and your risk of losing data is very low. On root servers, you have to handle data reliability yourself earlier.
(you should do backups either way, but you're likely going to use your backups more often on VPS/Dedicated offerings than in the cloud)
* surroundings services. Private networking, security features, etc.
You pay a premium for all that, so for the same raw compute performance, cloud prices will be at least 2-3x the price of a basic root or dedicated server. On the other hand, vps/dedicated servers typically include bandwidth in the price. The best choice depends on your requirements, but most people will blindly go towards cloud servers..
* availability. On AWS, you can start a couple dozens or hundreds of instances on demand, for a limited time. You are paying for that spare capacity. VPS/Dedicated servers generally have much lower spare capacity, and you're booking things by the month, not by the minute.
* reliability. Most real cloud instances live on networked drives, and your risk of losing data is very low. On root servers, you have to handle data reliability yourself earlier. (you should do backups either way, but you're likely going to use your backups more often on VPS/Dedicated offerings than in the cloud)
* surroundings services. Private networking, security features, etc.
You pay a premium for all that, so for the same raw compute performance, cloud prices will be at least 2-3x the price of a basic root or dedicated server. On the other hand, vps/dedicated servers typically include bandwidth in the price. The best choice depends on your requirements, but most people will blindly go towards cloud servers..