Performance wise there is no comparison; building your own modern servers is crazy fast compared to what you’ll get “in the cloud”.
One brand new top-of-the-line server costs about as much as two months of EC2 web application hosting – Building Servers for Fun and Prof… OK, Maybe Just for Fun
Unless you pay many thousands of dollars per month.
Our hosting bill at he.net is $600/month for the record. That includes “unlimited” 100 Mbps on a gigabit ethernet port, 15 amps, and a full 42U locked rack cabinet.