As someone who uses virtual machines on both providers (and a few more) - benchmarking a single virtual machine and taking that as the single conclusion is not

As someone who uses virtual machines on both providers (and a few more) - benchmarking a single virtual machine and taking that as the single conclusion is not going to give you accurate results which reflect the entire network of servers which either provider has. Both providers are likely to have certain host servers which are relatively empty, and others where a number of busy servers are going to really skew your results. The one thing I'd recommend is to install monitoring which can keep an eye on your servers to ensure the performance hasn't dropped significantly since you first provisioned it. Munin http://munin-monitoring.org/ http://munin-monitoring.org/ graphs disk IO latency by default, keeping a track of this allows you to make a decision on if you want to migrate a virtual machine elsewhere on the same provider - to see if you can avoid the noisy neighbours problem. Never assume that you'll get the same performance on a daily basis.