Forget about cost, which cloud service has the best performance?

Azure is fine. I have used it a lot coming from C#. I wouldn't recommend it with MySQL though.

Imo The performance difference is immeasurable. Matter of fact in theory the all share the same internet connection etc. I choose by location and ease of use. DO with forge is almost always a few clicks and done so I generally stick with them but DO doesn't offer last I checked central US.

@michalis Define ‘performance’.

Yeah, super difficult question with no simple answer. The below article shows a lot of different performance measurements of some popular cloud services. It's just over a year old but hopefully it's helpful. http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-cloud-compute-services.html

AWS is more about features and automation than performance, altho their higher tier servers and "dedicated" options can expensively give you more performance.

Their lower (micro, small, medium) tiers can suffer from:

A. Dying, randomly, especially the micro tiers B. Noisy neighbor affects

Last note: Developers' general focus on performance from a server point of view is almost always premature relative to the huge gains you can get out of reducing network calls and making database queries more efficient (perhaps via caching).

I've been very happy with linode for several years now.. Granted I've a relatively spendy ($40/mo) vps, but have gotten several free upgrades over the past couple years (more storage, bigger transfer data limit, more ram, etc), and it's got good uptime.

Leveraging varnish nginx, phpfpm and apc, my drupal (notoriously a resource hog and generally kind of slow) site loads every page just about instantly, including on the backend where things otherwise tend to get pretty slow usually.

Cloud based in theory (again) should be 100% uptime as they should have redundancy across multiple servers where dedicated or vps may not have that feature. Backups are always a good idea no matter what but the main benefit of a cloud based service should be zero downtime.

AWS