The major determinant in hosting cost isn't power, it's the cost of the hardware. But I mean, even if you don't buy my axiomatic derivation, you can just work this out from AWS and GCP pricing.
I always saw it being close to 7:3 with non recurring hardware cost to mrc facilities & power on 3 year depreciation for major markets.
That said all of the big cloud providers SHOULD have a structural advantage on all of those dimensions. None if the small players or self hosting shops are doing the volume, much less the original r&d, of the big cloud providers. The size of that discount, and how costly it really is to achieve, is another topic.
Disclosure: principal at AWS. Above information is my personal opinion based on general experience of 20 years in the industry doing networking, compute farms, and operations.
Even if [0] cloud does have structural advantage, it’s clear that cloud vendor isn’t willing or wanting to pass them off to customers, and tends to nickel and dime on other necessity like the infamous bandwidth cost.
[0] I’m really curious how big, if any, structural advantage large cloud vendor has over small-time colo user, because surely cloud comes with all kinds of overhead? All the fancy feature AWS provides cannot be free. If customer does not care for those, would colo, or a small “vps” vendor, actually have structural advantage over AWS?
