The TechEmpower benchmarks showed roughly a 10x difference in performance between AWS and bare-metal for basic webserving + DB, across many different languages and frameworks:
OK but that's a comparison of a $3200 machine with 7x more CPU and more than double the memory of the $100/month virtual machine. The operating costs of the metal machine (electricity, repairs) and its lifetime are unstated.
to be fair techempower benchmarks are not really "world comparable".
it's still just a benchmark. I know a lot of people take these benchmarks as their bread and butter, but there are so many "perf" hacks in them and they do not really have a lot in common with real world usage.