I more or less understand the reasons, but I do think it unfortunate and weird that the companies offering cloud services price them on some combination of RAM,

I more or less understand the reasons, but I do think it unfortunate and weird that the companies offering cloud services price them on some combination of RAM, disk space and bandwidth--CPU performance doesn't really figure, except occasionally in vague terms, and neither does disk access speed. RAM is important, sure, but there should be some way to quantify the expected CPU performance as well.