I tend to hear an argument that it is cheaper since you do not have to pay people to maintain those services, but in reality you still need that person to set up and maintain your particular cloud setup. And the services themselves are much much more expensive than maintaining your own servers in a data center.
In my opinion cloud hosting and services are more meant for large corporations where no one wants to take responsibility and is scared of doing anything. Cloud is a nice way to shift the blame if/when things go bad - "but cloud is industry standard, everyone does it".