A lot will depend upon the admins ability to do system administration for the best bang for the buck.
I personally will always choose self-hosted options. I've used Linux since it first came out on a TON of 3.5" diskettes. I'm comfortable with administering it from the CLI and now since I use CentMinMod to build the web stack with for my PHP based servers it's even easier.
By doing self hosting you also are able to run more than one site on your self-hosted platform where the cloud (I'm assuming you are referring to the SaaS offerings) are single site based only generally for each paid offering. And if you use different scripts, you may end up with multiple SaaS solutions on various providers.
To me, the cost/performance/flexibility leans to the self-hosted option(s). To use a few of my sites as examples. One is Xenforo and for the offering I'd need I would be paying $250 a month for their SaaS offering, not so much for the traffic aspect as the storage. Then for my Discourse site I'd be paying $100 month. Then I have 3 NodeBB sites running. The SaaS offering that I would need for them run $100 each for a total of $300.
So that's $600 a month minimum outlay.
Currently I pay less than $35 a month for a dedicated server and two VPS instances to run 5 sites. I run a PHP based instance on the larger dedicated server and then the two VPS installs run different platforms that require different setups (Discourse is Ruby/Ruby on Rails and nodeBB JS based).
The dedicated server running the Xenforo install gives me 350GB more storage for the "high" price of $17 a month (an older OVH Black Friday Kimsufi offering), unlimited traffic and unlimited page views. I've had zero issues with it for the 12 months it has been running on that server.
For the Discourse I am paying around $7 a month for a Contabo VPS instance (unlimited traffic/views and 200GB storage) and have had zero downtime with it.
For the 3 NodeBB installs, they run on another Contabo VPS (unlimited traffic/views and 200GB storage) at $6.50 a month and have had zero down time with them.
I also have a $15 a month Contabo VPS that I have configured for my mail server that I do most of my various sites transactional email with. The exception is the Xenforo install and it uses Amazon SES for my transactional email at a cost of around 10¢ a month that they don't even fool with billing me for even though I am out of their "free" period. I do use my custom MTA install for regular domain related email for the Xenforo site as well as my other sites. It also allows me to offer branded email for one of my sites as a member upgrade feature that is available to users with both webmail and email client access.
The Contabo VPS has a clean IP and ASN and neither are on any blacklists, so the mail delivery on it is also good.
