* [Ready. Steady. Go! The speed of VM creation and SSH access on AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vexxhost, Google Cloud, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure](https://blog.cloud66.com/ready-steady-go-the-speed-of-vm-creation-and-ssh-key-access-on-aws-digitalocean-linode-vexxhost-google-cloud-rackspace-and-microsoft-azure/)

and

[Comparing the speed of VM creation and SSH access of cloud providers](https://blog.cloud66.com/part-2-comparing-the-speed-of-vm-creation-and-ssh-access-on-aws-digitalocean-linode-vexxhost-google-cloud-rackspace-packet-cloud-a-and-microsoft-azure/)

are one way to measure some of the infrastructure speed provided by several

cloud vendors. The virtual machine and SSH access data points are taken in

multiple regions. It's unclear how these metrics would change over time based

on backend tweaks made by each provider.

* The [State of Cloud Instance Provisioning](https://ahmet.im/blog/cloud-instance-provisioning/)

explains the tools and operations behind how AWS,

[DigitalOcean](/digitalocean.html), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure stand up

virtual machine instances for you to use.

* [VPS $5 Showdown - October 2018 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. Vultr](https://joshtronic.com/2018/10/15/vps-showdown-october-2018/)

compares and contrasts the cheapest options for four popular virtual

private server providers.