I'm confused now. So which is it, do they rent out the excess hash power or do they sell it off?
Uhh... both. The landscape has been changing the past few months. Where have you been? They rent out hash power at a negotiated price with other companies, they make up the differences by charging hashlet owners maintenance in return for a admittedly made up number for daily payouts. All the while, those contracts have been expiring because those cloud mining companies use their profits to buy real hardware so they don't have to rely on GAW's. GAW sees that these contracts are getting harder to re-sign due to declining profits in scrypt mining especially, and rather than plod on, they are selling it off as they get their hashlet customers off on staking.
And what does it have to do with maintenance fees, we are talking about hashpower that doesn't have "hashlet owners" anymore, i.e. remaining after staker conversion.
No, there are still regular hashlet owners. The big push was getting people to switch to hashpoints, so they didn't have to retain as much physical hardware to back up the virtual miners. Then they convinced people to convert their primes and will do the same with the solo hashlets as much as possible.
Why do I have the feeling you're making this all up? I provide links with what I post, at the very least you should do the same if you continue to insist on your unproven (in my opinion and based on sources I find) statements.
I guess you just aren't understanding what I'm posting. I'll try harder.