Who's doing what in the cloud? Does it suck more? is it more expensive?
As with most things in life, the answer is
it depends. If you just take what you have on traditional hosting, pick it up and set it down in the cloud, you will probably pay more for a worse service. On the other hand, if you take the time to migrate it properly — using managed services like S3 and RDS (assuming you're on AWS) where appropriate, instrumenting your applications for autoscaling, and doing proper capacity planning so that you can buy reserved instances — it can be cheaper, easier and provide better availability.
Most people do something between these two extremes, and that's fine. Doing the cloud "right" is a lot of work, and you don't necessarily need to invest all that time upfront. Just be prepared to do things differently if you want to get your money's worth.
The cool thing about a cloud service is that I could spin up cool servers. I would have root privileges to install cool software. I could close off thousands of unused ports that the Russians are pounding on night and day. I could back it all up in a massive image.
You can do that stuff with a traditional VPS provider too. That's my preference for my personal servers, including the one that runs this forum, because I don't have the requirements of scale to justify proper cloud infrastructure.
Also, I need DV certs for the actual websites and I'm guessing that I may be on my own dealing with some CA to get them instead of a host providing them.
DV is just about as easy to do yourself with Let's Encrypt as it is with a cloud provider.
Anybody running webservers from a cloud service?
That is my full-time job, yes.